The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who was chief of staff to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a key strategist behind civil rights protests in the 1960s, died early on Tuesday at his home in Chester, Va. He was 88. His death was announced by the Rev. Al Sharpton, according to the New York Times. Dr. Walker was the first board chairman of the National Action Network, Sharpton’s organization.
Saddened to confirm that Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, MLK’s Executive Director and NAN’s first Board Chairman, has passed. A true giant and irreplaceable leader. A huge tree has fallen. pic.twitter.com/b3J1519cpR
— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) January 23, 2018
For six decades, Dr. Walker preached against intolerance and racial inequality from pulpits in the South, in New York City, and in five of the world’s seven continents. In 1994, he helped supervise South Africa’s first fully representative elections, when Nelson Mandela’s rise to power brought the end of the apartheid regime. His work as a civil rights advocate began in 1953. He met Dr. King while they were both students at the historically black Virginia Union University in Richmond. Dr. Walker joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961 when it was still just beginning, and served until 1964 as its executive director. Dr. Walker helped circulate “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement, and helped coordinate the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“I was fully committed to nonviolence, and I believe with all my heart that for the civil rights movement to prove itself, its nonviolent actions had to work in Birmingham,” Dr. Walker said during an interview with The New York Times in 2006. “If it wasn’t for Birmingham, there wouldn’t have been a Selma march, there wouldn’t have been a 1965 civil rights bill. Birmingham was the birthplace and affirmation of the nonviolent movement in America.”
For 37 years, Dr. Walker was a prominent community figure as the pastor at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem and from 1965 to 1975 he was a special assistant on urban affair to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. He was also a strong advocate of affordable housing and better schools in the low income neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan. He was on the front lines in the fight against drug trafficking and addiction in Harlem.
In one of his last interviews, Walker and his wife of 67 years, Theresa Ann, spoke to RealClearLife’s Steve Klinsky about their memories of the civil rights movement — from experiences in jail to the untold story of the landmark Letter From a Birmingham Jail to how King’s death still reverberates in race relations a year ago. Watch the videos below.
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