Frederick Lamar White Jr., known as Lamar White Jr. is an American publisher, investigative journalist, political blogger, and civil rights activist from New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the founder and publisher of The Bayou Brief a non-profit, Louisiana-based news and culture publication. White, Jr. is primarily known for his investigative reporting on racism and political corruption in the American Deep South.
Career
In 2005, White, Jr. launched CenLamar, a self-published political commentary website about Louisiana. Although the website was never a professional venture, his work as a freelance blogger eventually attracted statewide attention and notoriety. A decade later, when he shuttered the publication, the site had attracted more than two million readers. In 2012, White, Jr. was the last person to engage in an online argument with the conservativenew media mogul Andrew Breitbart, minutes before he unexpectedly died. Breitbart's final tweet is an apology to White, Jr. for calling him a "putz." Later that year, White, Jr. first exposed problems in Louisiana voucher schools, including Light City Academy, which was led by a self-proclaimed "prophet" who taught students how to become "prophets." Light City Academy was closely associated with several questionable nonprofit organizations; there were questions about the financing of the school. Following White's report, Light City Academy was prohibited from accepting any additional voucher students. In October 2014, White, Jr. advocated on behalf of TexasDemocraticgubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who was defeated in 2014 by RepublicanGreg Abbott. Davis featured White as a speaker about disability rights and Governor-elect Abbott's record on the Americans with Disabilities Act. White, Jr. wrote for the Houston Chronicle about his disability and the identity politics surrounding disabilities.
On February 3, 2015, White, Jr. tweeted a photograph of a portrait of former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. The portrait, which White, Jr. incorrectly described as the governor's official portrait, had been displayed prominently at the entrance to his office in the state Capitol. The portrait depicted Jindal, an Indian-American, as significantly more light-skinned than he appears, spurring a national discussion about racial identity and representation. In June 2017, White, Jr. permanently closed his website CenLamar and launched a professional nonprofit news publication, The Bayou Brief. On September 10, 2018, White, Jr. uncovered evidence that bot accounts had been inundating Twitter with identical messages of support for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz during the middle of his intense campaign against Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke. White, Jr.'s tweet about this suspicious online activity was shared more than 35,000 times and had been read by more than 3.5 million people within a day.
On November 11, 2018, White, Jr. published a ten-second video clip of interim U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi at a small gathering in Tupelo. The video shows the end of a local cattle rancher praising the senator. Hyde-Smith then says, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row." White, Jr.'s publication of her comments quickly went viral, which many understood to be a clear reference to lynchings, and Hyde-Smith, whose opponent is an African American, was swiftly condemned by civil rights leaders and organizations across the country. Hyde-Smith refused to apologize, and instead, she claimed her comment was an "exaggerated expression of regard.".
Early life
White, Jr. was born in Alexandria, Louisiana and graduated from Alexandria Senior High School, a public high school in Rapides Parish, in 2000. At the age of twelve months, he was diagnosed with spastic quadriplegia, a subset of cerebral palsy, which required a series of corrective orthopedic and neurological medical procedures and daily physical therapy. His parents, Carol Rhodes White and Lamar White, Sr. were both regionally well-known and successful real estate brokers and investors. After high school, White graduated from Rice University in Houston earning a BA in English and Religious Studies. In 2001, when he was a freshman at Rice, his father died in a single car accident at the age of 41. White, Jr. returned to his hometown of Alexandria in 2005 to work for the mayoral campaign of Jacques Roy and subsequently as Mayor Roy's publicist and special assistant. In 2011, he moved to Dallas, Texas and enrolled in law school at Southern Methodist University, his late father's alma mater. He is the grandson of the late Joanne Lyles White, a philanthropist, and the great-nephew of the late historianSue Eakin, whose lifelong work on Solomon Northup resulted in the Oscar-winning adaptation of the film Twelve Years a Slave.
