Transcript: Walter White: Reporting the Crime

NARRATION: One organization stood firmly against this onslaught of evil: the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the foremost interracial civil rights organization in America. One man was becoming the unlikely hero of the NAACP's battle against racial terrorism. Twenty-seven-year-old Walter White became the chief investigator of lynchings and massacres.

WENDELL LAW: Walter White's task was to come into the South …and oh, one of the heroic stories and we don't tell it anymore. Here was a black man, who was, had blue eyes and blond hair, who risked his life going among the lynchers. Passing as a white man. And got the names of many of white men who had been a part of lynch mobs.

NARRATION: At the NAACP, they thought White was risking his life. He knew he was. He wrote to his superiors.

VOICE OF WALTER WHITE: "I understand that this is dangerous. I take full responsibility if anything happens to me, and I hold you not liable in the event of my injury or death." Walter White.

NARRATION: As the summer of 1919 drew to a close, White read a newspaper account claiming that black farmers near the town of Elaine, Arkansas had incited an armed uprising against the local white community.

VOICE OF WALTER WHITE: "I was eager to go to the scene and left for Arkansas on the first train, after we had scraped up enough money for the fare." Walter White.

NARRATION: When White arrived, he discovered that black farmers, tired of continually being cheated out of their fair share of the cotton crop, had formed a union to sue their landlords.

VOICE OF WALTER WHITE: "They were meeting in a Negro church in Hoop Spur. When a white mob fired on the church, the fire of the attackers was returned and one of the assailants was killed. The match had been applied to the powder keg. Within a few minutes, efficiently directed, heavily armed mobs swept over the countryside hunting down and killing every Negro they could find." Walter White.

NARRATION: When the killing stopped, some said as many as two hundred blacks had been killed. Hundreds were arrested, twelve sentenced to death for killing whites. But even as White was uncovering the evidence which would ultimately free all of the accused, he found himself suddenly in danger.

VOICE OF WALTER WHITE: "I was interviewing some whites when a black man told me that my identity had been discovered and a lynching party was prepared for me. I boarded the first train out of Helena. The conductor said, "You're leaving just before the fun is about to start. There's a damned yellow nigger down here passing for white and the boys are gonna get him, and when they get through with him, he won't pass for white no more." No matter what the distance, I shall never take a train ride as long as that one. Later in Memphis I learned that news had been circulated there that I had been lynched in Arkansas that afternoon." Walter White.