"FORGOTTEN HERO: WALTER WHITE AND THE NAACP" Film Preview & Discussion

Join us for a preview of FORGOTTEN HERO: WALTER WHITE AND THE NAACP, a new documentary film from PBS's American Experience, premiering Tues., Feb 25 at 9/8c on PBS stations nationwide.

While many think that the civil rights movement began in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, the stage had been set decades before by activists in 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 looks for the reasons behind his disappearance from our history.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the filmmakers and interviewees from the film.

Panelists:

Michelle Smawley (director) is an award-winning director, series developer and educator. She has worked with ABC, CBS, CNN, HBO, and many others, most recently running a year-long series for a statewide initiative for WNET. She was also the founding Executive Producer for TRAX, the first podcast network for preteens, which earned a Peabody Award nomination in 2021. Smawley is an adjunct professor at NYU. She has also served on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism and the Graduate Program in Social Documentary at the School of Visual Arts.

Rob Rapley (writer, producer) is the founder of Apograph Productions, and has written, directed, and produced many award-winning films for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, including most recently The Lie Detector and Voice of Freedom. Rob has received three Emmy nominations, a Writer’s Guild Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, and many other honors. A classically-trained musician, Rob was also nominated for an Emmy as a sound mixer, and has engineered Grammy-winning recordings with some of the great classical artists of our time.

David Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University, and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. A two-time finalist for the National Book Award, he is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The conversation will be moderated by Cameo George. George is an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and journalist with more than 25 years of experience in documentary, broadcast television and digital content production. George has produced, developed and commissioned innovative programming at CNN, NBC News and ABC News. She was the senior producer of CNN’s groundbreaking series Black in America and Latino in America and executive producer of the eight-hour PBS documentary series 16 FOR '16: THE CONTENDERS, which was also broadcast on the BBC. George joined American Experience from ABC News, where she was head of development for long-form projects, responsible for creating a pipeline of docuseries and feature documentary films across Walt Disney Television platforms, including ABC News, Hulu, National Geographic and Disney+. She was recently named to The Root’s list of 2024’s 100 Most Influential Black Americans.

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Major funding for American Experience provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance, Carlisle Companies and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Funding for Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Additional funding for American Experience provided by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, The American Experience Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers.

Host or Publisher AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on PBS