Lulu B. White
1900–July 6, 1957
Teacher and civil rights activist Lulu Belle White was born in 1900 in the East Texas town of Elmo.
After graduating from Prairie View College, she married Houston businessman and longtime NAACP member Julius White. In the 1930s, she left teaching to work fulltime for the NAACP, and, in 1943, became its first paid female executive secretary.
In 1945, White enlisted Heman Marion Sweatt to be the plaintiff in the challenge to the "separate but equal" doctrine at The University of Texas law school, which created a vital precedent for Brown v. Board of Education.
White became director of statewide NAACP branches and, later, a national field worker. With fellow activist Juanita Craft, White traveled throughout Texas and beyond, organizing new NAACP chapters, rejuvenating old ones, raising funds, and investigating miscarriages of justice. Both White and Craft were dynamic speakers and imposing figures. Working through church networks, labor unions, and other groups, they mobilized Blacks to fight for voting rights, desegregation, and equal pay.
Assertive and fearless, White was a force of nature in her opposition to Jim Crow. "We cannot sit idly by and expect things to come to us," she asserted. "We must go out and get them." Shortly before her death, in 1957, the national NAACP established the Lulu White Freedom Fund in her honor.
For More about Lulu White
The Women in Texas History project, created by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women’s History, includes an audio biography of Lulu White, which is available online.
An obituary of White’s death from the July 19th, 1957 edition of the San Antonio Register is accessible through The Portal to Texas History. Lulu White is buried in the Paradise North Cemetery in Houston alongside her husband, Julius White.
Selected Bibliography
Gillette, Michael L. "The Rise of the NAACP in Texas." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (April 1978): 393–46.
Hine, Darlene Clark, Steven F. Lawson, and Merline Pitre. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Lavergne, Gary M. Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
Pitre, Merline. "Building and Selling the NAACP: Lulu B. White as an Organizer and Mobilizer." East Texas Historical Journal 39, no. 1 (2001): 21–32.
Pitre, Merline. In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.
Spanish Translation
Download the Spanish translation of this Texas Originals script.
Portrait of Lulu B. White. Courtesy of Michael L. Gillette.