Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP

Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP (2025)

Documentary

While many consider the birth of the civil rights movement to be 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, the stage had been set decades before by activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the NAACP leaders are familiar, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, has been all but forgotten. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Walter White looked white; he described himself as “an enigma, a Black man occupying a white body.” Like virtually all light-skinned African Americans of his day, White was descended from enslaved Black women and powerful white men. But he was Black — by law, identity, and conviction and spent his entire life fighting for Black civil rights. Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP traces the life of this neglected civil rights hero and seeks to explain his disappearance from our history.

Director: Michelle Smawley

Casts

	Joe Morton as Narrator
	Geoffrey Owens as Walter White (voice)
	Kenneth Mack as Self
	Karlos Hill as Self
	Patricia Sullivan as Self
	Josef M. Anderson as Self
	Kidada Williams as Self
	Ellis Monk as Self
	Adriane Lentz-Smith as Self
	Randolph Stakeman as Self
	Rose Palmer as Self
	David Levering Lewis as Self
	Clarissa Myrick-Harris White as Self
	Kenneth Janken as Self
	Claudia Phillipe as Self

Crew