Walter Francis White Undercover Lynchings

Walter Francis White was a Black civil rights investigator in the Jim Crow era who had white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, and he used that appearance to infiltrate white communities and document lynchings. He traveled to scenes of racial violence posing as a white man, listened to participants describe what they had done, and gathered details that outsiders could not safely obtain. He then reported those findings to expose the brutality of lynch mobs and the systems that protected them.

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