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.

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

American Experience is proud to partner with The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, APEX Museum, and The National Center for Civil and Human Rights to present this event.

About the film:

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. 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 seeks to explain his disappearance from our history.

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.

Dr. Clarissa Myrick-Harris is a higher education administrator, scholar, activist and public historian whose research and publications focus on Intersectionality and African American leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power/Black Arts Movement. She is a professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College, where she was previously the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, the first woman academic dean in the institution’s history. Dr. Myrick-Harris is also the lead organizer of the Morehouse/Points of Light initiative Listen Learn Act to End Racism, which seeks to raise awareness of the historical and present day manifestations of systemic racism and social injustices.

The conversation will be moderated by Cameo George (Executive Producer of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE). 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.