The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret by A. J. Baime

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret by A. J. Baime A riveting biography of Walter F. White, a little-known Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement. White’s risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America’s most prominent leader. A character study of White’s life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now. By the award-winning, best-selling author of The Accidental President,Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy,White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey come here there good podcast i certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Why do I always have to do the Chris Voss show thing, man?

God, it's so annoying. I hate doing that thing, but people love it. They run up to me at shows and go, the Chris Voss show. And so I can never quit doing it. It's really annoying. But I guess I love it. Remember, sign up for the free YouTube for an unlimited time. You can go there and hit the bell notification button.

You can see all the wonderful videos we have. There's like 4,500 videos or something like that up there. I've lost track. It's a gross amount. So go watch them all. In fact, you can watch all the book author podcasts in a playlist. If you just want to watch like 5 billion authors, you can just do the book author playlist and just listen. Also, go see our great LinkedIn newsletter. It's Killing It Over on LinkedIn, 132,000 group also over there on LinkedIn. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, wherever those cool kids are playing these days. Also, go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button. There's no bell notification on Goodreads. Made you look, didn't I? Anyway, guys, we have a new book has hit the marketplace wherever fine books are sold the book is called white lies the double life of walter f white wait is that the guy from breaking bad maybe not the double life of walter f white and america's darkest secret with a.j bame is on the show with us today the The book just barely came out, February 8th, 2022, for you watching this 10 years from now. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental President, Harry S. Truman,

and The Four Months That Changed the World, The Arsenal of Democracy, FDR, Detroit, and an epic quest to arm an America at war. Go like hell, Ford, Ferrari, and their battle for speed and glory at Le Mans. And Dewey defeats Truman, the 1948 election, and the battle for America's soul. Blame is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have. And Blame, that cut off on the chat, his articles have. What was the rest of that? Appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Ah, it cut that off in the chat. It only gave us that part there. So there's the rest of it. Welcome to the show, AJ. How are you? Chris, it's a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, it was a team effort there on the bio. I think that's what we wanted.

We just had you come in for the final wrap. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. I'm sorry? Give us your plugs so that people can find you on the interwebs. Oh, yeah. Well, look for ajbame.com, at ajbame at Twitter.

We have all sorts of technological difficulties today. So my Facebook got hacked. So I'm currently kicked off Facebook because somebody hacked me and sent out all my strange misinformation to the world. So find me on Twitter, please, at ajbame. There you go. There you go. My Instagram actually got hacked recently too.

And I have to go send a letter to Instagram to try and get it back because they think it was a fake account. I've owned it since the beginning of Instagram. So I think something's going on with their AI. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Well, a bunch of things. Walter White, nobody has really written a mainstream biography of this person who I think is an extraordinarily important person. It stuns me. I find it actually amazing that if you say the words Walter White today, people just only think of Breaking Bad. They don't know who this person is. It's a very tricky thing to launch into the marketplace, a biography of someone

who nobody's ever heard of. But I thought to myself, this guy's story is so incredible and so hard to believe is true and so important in terms of our American history that it was going to get people's attention. And it's only been out for a week and it's, yeah. Maybe people get confused with the guy who threw the pizza on the roof then. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There you go. So give us an overall arcing view of the book. What is it about?

What does it entail? Okay, well, this is what it's about. It's about a guy named Walter White who gets plucked from obscurity and brought to New York in 1918. And basically, he describes himself as the enigma of a black person inside a white body, right? So he was born into a black family, went to a black school, went to a black university, black church, raised in Atlanta by a black family. Both of his parents had been born into enslaved families. So his parents were really the last of the last generation who could speak of the slave era from, but Walter had been born with white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and he looked as white as I do right now. And so he decided to live as a double life.

And that's why the book is called The Double Life of Walter F. White. The first half of his life of the book is spent talking about these investigations that he conducted. So every time, starting in 1918, all the way to 1931, really bizarrely violent period in our American history, every time there was an episode of racial violence, the same kind of things that we hear about on the news today times a thousand, he would go undercover and leave Harlem where he lived as a black man. And he would go undercover as a white man and investigate these crimes and bring light to these criminal activities, ritualistic murders that were happening in our country that people were not being told about. Second half of the book is really about politics.

He becomes a national political force. And how does he do this and what are the vehicles he uses to do this with? Well, he does it with the skin color. So he basically is a zealot type character because he's a black man with white skin. And thusly, he can blend into any environment. And as a crusader for justice and civil rights, there's a bizarre element of sort of superhero-edness. And this is something that one of the reviewers actually mentioned today, I think, that he sort of weaponized his skin color to be an agent of, to be a crime fighter, to be an agent of change in our country. So he works with the Harlem Renaissance,

the NAACP, and he's also a newspaper man? All of the above. Okay. So throughout the 1920s. Yeah, go ahead. So those are the vehicles he's using to try and do the social justice or the justice for this sort of thing and put it out? Absolutely. Yeah. So when he starts in 1918, nobody had heard of the NAACP. His undercover investigations caused these shocking headlines. You can imagine these long stories he would write and the magazines like The Crisis, which was the NAACP magazine, but also People Have Hurt the Nation, The New Republic. He would write these big exposés about the fact that these massive ritualistic murders

were happening in our country in front of crowds as large as appeared at some Major League Baseball games and no one would ever be arrested. Now, a lot of these were lynchings the lynchings that were going on that i know there's the big museum now they have that it covers just the just horrific amount of lynchings that were going on the south and so he would go down and and because he was white he could figure out find out maybe who who was at the core of these crimes that's exactly right so the first time he does this, it's 1918, and there's a lynching that occurs in Tennessee.

And he goes to this tiny, tiny little town and introduces himself in the local store as a traveling salesman. He makes up this identity. He works for the Exalento Medicine Company. And he's selling a brand of hair straightener and he's all out of product. He's got time to sit in this market and talk to these people.

He gets them to admit everything instantly. It's not very hard to the sleuthing that he begins doing. That's the first case. He goes on to do 44 of these. Does he call him out? Is this,

does it lead to arrests and prosecution or? Well, that's a, that's a great question. And that's very much part of the story. So Walter would write these big reports. He would barge into the offices of governors in Arkansas and Georgia, and he would deliver these hand memorandums saying,

these are the killers. This is who did it. Everybody in these communities knows who did it. Nobody is arrested. What are you going to do? And he would go in and give these reports to the governor of Georgia, the governor of Arkansas, and then release them to the press. Oh, wow. And watch the firestorm explode. Oh, wow. And yet still, in all of these cases, no arrests were ever made, even though it was clear that everybody knew who the identities of the killers were,

which is what leads to the second half of the book, because he realizes that this sort of undercover work is getting him nowhere, even though he's publishing, he's becoming famous doing this. So that's when he decides to go into politics. And so what happens then when he gets into politics? Well, it's the 1930s. FDR is in office. And one of the things that he tries to do is he becomes a major part of the effort to create a federal anti-lynching law, which is something that is still happening today.

We're still many people in Congress are still trying to make this happen and it doesn't. And the idea is if there's a lynching or a murder in a small community or a big community and no one is arrested and the local law enforcement is not enforcing the law, then the federal government has the right to come into that state and charge crimes federally. So that's what he started. That's how he got into politics. That was the beginning. And ultimately becomes the sort of force of nature who is the main force of this historic shift of black American voting power from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln to the Democrats where it remains today. Quite interesting, man.

And this is during the whole height of the Jim Crow era, too. Yeah. Yep. And that's sort of the trajectory of his life. He's born into Atlanta when everything is slightly, at least in Atlanta, pretty peachy. Everybody gets along. And things go quickly haywire when he's a kid. And that's when he decides that he wants to do what he can to stop the trajectory of what's going on in our country.

Well, this must be quite the story because being able to play that dual role, I mean, that gives you access to so much stuff. You can see both sides of the coin, if you will. Well, as a writer, Chris, thank you for saying that. That's what appealed to me because the same time that this guy is conducting these investigations in the South and rural South posing as a white man, he's also becoming a famous writer and novelist in Harlemlem living as a black man so his story illuminates both of those worlds at the same time which makes him particularly unique character this is pretty this is pretty interesting one of the gentlemen we've had on the show a couple times who works at some universities i forget which ones but he's he's black albino i think i think he has albinism. And so he looks like half black or half white. And growing up, it's bad enough growing up black where people call you things and names. He was getting shit from both sides because he has albinism. So it was kind of interesting to see his perspective

on how he grew up and what he dealt with. But it sounds like this gentleman was very, very, very white. Very white. Yeah, he had blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin. But something you just said is really interesting because I want to paint a picture for your listeners. Check this out. Just imagine this so in um in atlanta where he's grown up after basically things go south and around 1906 and seven so he's a kid and there are these streetcars and every time you get on a streetcar if you're black you sit all the way in the back and every seat in the back you can

work in your way toward the front and if you're white you sit in the front and every front seat you can work in your way toward the back but every every time Walter would get on one of these streetcars with his family, people would go crazy because it was like they, everybody knew him. So if he sat at the front, he would, his parents would get yelled at. If he sat at the back, his parents would get yelled at. That's sort of an example of how bizarre it was. That is crazy, man. The history of our country is just so insane. The more you learn about it and everything else. What are some other things or stories do you want to tease out that you think readers are really going to appreciate?

For me, when I sat down to the LA Times quoted me in this humiliating way this weekend. They just humiliated me. My friend was laughing at me. My wife was like, what the bleep? Because the Times writer quoted me and like, I didn't expect it. I mean, the LA Times, I didn't expect the quote, but I knew he, I guess in my heart, I knew he would, but he quoted me saying that I cried every day that I wrote this book for over three years. But it's sort of like

not untrue because I think that what I try to do as a writer, what I've always tried to do, and sometimes people come to my books from an academic point of view and they don't really understand where I'm coming from. But I feel like the goal is with people reading books, not to just understand information that's being given to them, but to try to make them feel. And I feel like that's what I ultimately tried to do with this book because Walter's story, every part of it, every page, it felt like I was either furiously angry or desperately sad. And that was sort of the trajectory of his life. And that's why he died pretty young. He did not look young. He died youngish he started having heart

attacks because he literally worked himself to death wow it's awesome at all yeah i mean yeah well the a lot of the reviews that you have on the amazon talk about your how great you are pouring into the story and and making it interesting and the emotion is the big thing i mean when you're right with emotion usually that comes through in the book and delivers out the other side. So how come more people didn't hear about this or why isn't he celebrated? Chris, that's a great question. So the answer to that question is built into the story. And there's really two reasons.

So the whole time, Walter, like you can imagine a guy, it's bizarre, but I'm telling people to read the book because it's true. But if you can imagine that in the new age of television, that the new generation of black civil rights leaders were not really keen on having somebody who might look like me as their leader. But there's more. Let me try to squeeze this down into a small space. But at the time, it's hard to imagine, but this is true. In the 1920s and 1930s, we had members of our Congress and the Senate and congressmen defend the act of lynching on the floor of Congress. And this is true because it's in the congressional record. I'm not making this up. It's in the congressional record.

I believe that. Quotations are in the book. I set those scenes. A lot of what they would say is that this is like to say this in a public forum, people are going to go crazy, but this was the truth. This is what was happening, that they were defending the act of lynching because they said that black people were out for white women, right? That was their defense. Throughout Walter's life, he was married to a black woman and had black children, but he was secretly having an affair with her. At the end of his life, toward the end of his life,

he married this woman and left his wife. His kids never spoke to him again. And all his critics said, see, we were right all along. We were right all along. And it destroyed his reputation very quickly. Oh, really? Yeah. And so when he died, his legacy was lost to history.

It never made the history books. And he just disappeared. Wow. What a tragic story, man. man yeah that is heartbreaking wow and it sounds like he was a real precursor maybe who laid a foundation for those civil rights leaders to come like martin luther king maybe well of course he did during the 1930s there was sort of like when all of this was brewing you have to imagine that when he started at the NAACP in 1918, nobody had heard of it.

Very few people had even heard of it. By the time he became chief executive, he was chief executive of the NAACP. He takes over, essentially, in 1930. It's the biggest, most powerful civil rights organization. And you have to ask yourself,

if he was that, why haven't people heard of him? Now, I don't think I've answered your question, but I kind of forgot what it was. I'm sorry. Could you repeat it? I think it was, why haven't more people heard of him? And did he lay a foundation for Martin Luther King? Yes, he did. Of course he did.

Yeah. But again, by the time television arrived, it was a new era. This is pretty interesting. Does he go through some stories in the books where he almost gets caught or busted when he's in the South and people start figuring out who he is after a while and start catching him, trying to catch them? Yes. And so every time he conducts one of these investigations undercover, he publishes his findings. The bigger stink he makes, the more effective this investigation is going to become.

So each time he does it, he's becoming more and more famous throughout the 1920s. And thus, every time he goes undercover again, it's more likely that he's going to get caught. And if he's investigating ritualistic murders, he obviously understands what he could be in for if his identity is found. And there is one instance that he recalls where he's, I believe he's in Arkansas, I think, or no, it was in Georgia. It was in Georgia where he's going down the street

and he's pretending to be a white man. And somebody comes up to him and he says, you got to get out of town. They know who you are and they're coming after you. And so he has to sprint to the train station and he gets to the booth to buy a ticket. And the train station, there's only two trains out of town each day and he's hoping he can get one. He's not sure. And the ticket salesman says, where are you going? The excitement's about to start. There's this guy who's pretending to be black. I mean, pretending to be white. He's black in our town right now. And we're going to find him and go get him. The ticket salesman says this to him. Holy crap. And the barbarity of the crimes he was investigating,

he had to know. Yeah. These guys aren't nice guys you're playing with. No. Yeah. Yeah, that would be like, yeah, that's, yeah, it's like going in the basement of a serial killer. And what was that movie? What's that movie? Silence of the Lambs.

Silence of the Lambs, yeah. You're like going right inside the house to walk around. You're like, you know what they're capable of. That is crazy, yeah. You're like going right inside the house to walk around. You know what they're capable of. That is crazy, man. So interesting times with this gentleman. What sort of research access did you guys have access to? Did you keep a journal? Imagine this is you work with the NAACP.

There was some history or some notes and records. Yeah, there was. Well, it's interesting that you ask that question because this guy, Walter White, appeared, Walter Francis White, not to be mistaken with Breaking Bad. He appears as like a minor character in the last three books that I've written. So I've been building this book for 15 years. And there was one point where his papers are at Yale University, and I went there to look at them. And I spent a week there just to find out if there was enough to do this book. And what I found there kind of blew my mind because I found, just as an example, his handwritten notes from his investigations.

He's down conducting these undercover. And I have his handwritten notes, like, I'm interviewing so-and-so. He's wearing spectacles. He has big jowls. He is writing down what he's saying, things like that. And I was in New York researching in the New York public library in the various branches. They have a ton of material in there. And right when I was there, that's when COVID hit.

That was the week. I remember being at a bar in Grand Central Station, drinking a beer with a friend of mine. And that's when the NBA announced like, we're canceling our season. And I was like, oh no, how am I going to travel around the country finding these records? But the NAACP papers are all digitized and they're all public. So a lot of that work was done right here in my house. That's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's got to be so hard to get records. So a lot of the newspapers would write about his reports, and they still couldn't put enough pressure on the governors or, I guess, attorney generals to look into him in the South. That's correct. And then really there's this defining moment that's sort of a climactic moment in the book where, you know, by the end of the book, Walter F. White is this political force, and he's a frequent guest in the White House. So he sits down with Harry Truman, and he's like, look, this is what's going on. There's another wave of post-war violence. And this was particular because after World War II,

there were a number of instances where black men who had served the country in war, wore the uniform in combat, won medals, pinned to their uniforms, came back to have really bad things, really bad things happen to them in their communities in this country, and nobody was charged with any crime. So Walter goes into the White House and he demands of Truman that something be done. And there's this dramatic moment where Harry Truman, at that time President President of the United States, and from Missouri, a border state, so from a segregated state, from a family that had sided with the South in the Civil War, Truman is the one who says, we have to do something. And that's when the whole sort of story changes, where the White House gets behind the Civil Rights Movement at that moment.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And kind of starts laying a foundation for that to take place. But that was a great trip. I mean, the tragedies are endless, especially if you've seen that lynching museum. I think it's in Birmingham, Alabama. It's just extraordinary.

And a lot of stuff didn't get documented and took place. And so they just kind of, even the amount that they were able to document was just horrific. And I remember there was some article I saw recently, I think it was in the Washington Post, where someone who'd been beaten up and saved by a preacher 50 years ago, 53 years ago, he was holding signs that they were talking about that, where they come back from the war, and here they served America, put their lives on the line, and yet they still couldn't get full freedom back here in a country they fought freedom for. Just an ugly irony.

So yeah, it's really interesting. But I'm glad you brought this to light and brought it out so that people can celebrate what he's doing, especially, I think we're still in Black History Month, right? February. We still in February. I don't know what month it is sometimes. Chris, I feel you. I'm right there with you.

I am. But yes, I mean, the want to say, and I hope like readers and people watching will might understand, like, it's like terrifying to put out a book like this. It's got a hot button issue in it. Every single one. Anything you can imagine that's a hot button issue is in this book and can be told through this guy's life. And people are going to respond. People are going to get angry. People are going to upset. They're going to give me bad reviews. Thus far, there's only been one

bad review and everybody else has been going nuts saying it's about time. But, you know, it's not relaxing. You know? Well, yeah, I mean, you should be pretty good. People don't realize how we're really not that far removed. We're less than 100 years removed from this racism. And that's why it's still steeped so deeply in our society and everything else. And of course, it's so interwoven. Racism is in between institutions and our laws and patterns. I mean, you still see, what is it, the filibuster that's in the Senate. This is a racist sort of thing. They used to keep things from being lost, from being passed on the South.

And it's so extraordinary. And it's so important that we learn these things. Because a lot of this is lost in history or hasn't been highlighted or what we would call whitewashed in history. And so I think it's important to have more of these stories and more color painted into our history and a better understanding. Because until we address the ugliness of our history, we can never change the future because we're just doomed to repeat it. That's absolutely true. I'll say it's like it's courageous of you to have me on your show talking about this stuff because people get upset, have their own version of their own history. They want to have their own version of what they think America is or supposed to be or what the past was.

Yeah. We've had a lot of great authors on the show over the past two or three years. Everything we've gone from everything from the original lie of the shining city on the hill and all the bullshit excuse that was used to made to slaughter the Indians and enslave everybody. And just the horrific things we've been doing for 450 years and everything all the way up to the Alamo and all that good stuff. They get a lot of crazy comments on their video. The comments out of this one. Well, you just threw Texas right in there.

So you're probably going to, you're probably threw the chum right in the water for the Texans. Apparently. There you go. Anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go out or any more people you want to piss off so we can get more comments on the video? Listen, I spent years working on this book. It's a fair book.

It's fair. There you go. I'm sorry if it pisses people off. I think it's important that people read it and I hope they do. And people, when people get pissed off, they should really look at like, why does this bother me there is a thing of white fragility and white shame where people and i've and i've heard actually republican voters say this we were really ugly to minorities for 250 450 years and when they when we become the minority which i think is like what the next 10 to 20 years they're going to

treat us just as bad. It's like, well, maybe you should just start treating people better so that when you are the minority, they won't think they need to repay the favor. It might be a good time to start being a nice person. I don't know. I think that's a good idea. That I can get beyond. I hope everybody can get beyond that. Yeah.

Let's all just try and get along and kumbaya and be good human beings to each other. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on, AJ. We certainly appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. There you go. Give us your plugs one more time, too, as we go out.

Twitter at AJ Bame. Facebook, Disenabled. So. Stay tuned. See if it gets. Hopefully you get it back, bud. Go pick up the book, guys. White Lies, The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret by AJ if it gets hopefully you get it back but go pick up the book guys white lies the double life of

walter f white and america's darkest secret by aj blame you can pick that up wherever fine books are sold is there any point in the book where he says say my name it's probably not all right sorry i'll put that joke in there at the end guys go see the youtube video at youtube.com forrest is chris moss you're from te. You can leave some comments. They're free. Yeah, I might delete some if they're not really awful. Anyway, also go to goodreads.com for us. Chris Moss, all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,

all those different places. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.