Civil Rights Film Series: Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP and With a Made-Up Mind: The History of the Black Vote in Southwest Florida, a Black History Month Program

A screening of the PBS short films Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP, the story of little known head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, and With a Made-Up Mind: The History of the Black Vote in Southwest Florida, an overview of the fight for ballot access in Lee County.

Teens and adults.

Registration appreciated.

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. In Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP, we meet Walter White who, with his blond hair and blue eyes, 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.

With a Made-Up Mind: The History of the Black Vote in Southwest Florida explores Jim Crow legislation at the turn of the 20th century to today’s push to return civil rights to citizens who have served their felony sentences. This short film provides an overview of the fight for ballot access in Lee County, Florida, and examines the history of voter suppression among African Americans since Reconstruction.

Presented in partnership with the Stamford NAACP.