Struggle for desegregation
Civil Rights veteran tried to check out a Robert E Lee book from the library and got jailed instead
ON A COLD day in 1960, a fed-up Wyatt Tee Walker led a group of protesters through the “whites-only” entrance of the Petersburg, Virginia public library. Walker, the pastor of the historic Gillfield Baptist Church, calmly walked to the library’s counter and asked for a biography of Confederate general Robert E Lee.
“I was rubbing it in their noses a little because I always felt Robert E Lee was guilty of treason and should have been arrested and put in prison,” said Walker, now 88, “but the South made such a hero of him.” His attempt to borrow
by Douglas Southall Freeman on February 27, 1960, was interrupted by shouts.
“I heard somebody say, ‘The n ***** s are here!’” recalled Walker, who would later serve as chief of staff for the Reverend Martin Luther King jr.
“They called the police and arrested those of us who would not leave. They took us to the Petersburg jail and that stirred up the community.”
It was the first of Walker’s 17 arrests for challenging segregation in Virginia and other parts of the South – an era vividly chronicled in the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens on September 24. The Petersburg library sit-in would become a catalyst for desegregating the small city’s lunch counters, bus terminal, restaurants and public swimming pools.
Were they courageous? “Maybe so,” Walker said. “But we didn’t think about fear. We wanted to get rid of segregation. It was so humiliating to be an African-American in those days.”
Tapped by King to be the first fulltime executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Walker challenged Jim Crow in Mississippi and Alabama.
He and King were arrested during a 1967 protest in Birmingham and spent five days together in the jail. Walker smuggled in a tiny camera, taping it to his leg. In their cell, he took a photo of King gazing through the steel bars that became an iconic image. King snapped a photo of Walker looking out the same bars. Six months later, King was assassinated in Memphis. ARRESTED: A 1961 mug shot of Wyatt Tee Walker and his wife, Theresa, who were both held by police for protesting against segregation.
Walker spoke about the events that defined his life and redefined the country in the community room of his assisted living complex, which he navigates with the help of a wheelchair. His wife, Theresa Ann Walker, 89, who was jailed alongside him in Jackson, Mississippi, sat nearby.
Wyatt Tee Walker is one of the few civil rights movement strategists still alive.
He was born on August 16, 1929, in Brockton, Massachusetts. His father, who was a minister, and his mother, who was a nurse, moved the family to Merchantville, New Jersey. When Wyatt was 9, he and his two older sisters desegregated the town’s movie theatre. “The picture playing was
he recalled. Walker’s father had a huge influence on him.“He resisted anything that discriminated against you because you were African-American.”
In 1946, Wyatt Walker moved to Richmond to attend Virginia Union University. He went on to Virginia Union Graduate School of Theology, where he met King during a student conference.
Years later, as Walker led integration efforts in Virginia, King called to recruit him.On May 24, 1961, the Walkers and dozens of other Freedom Riders boarded buses heading for Jackson.
For the first time, Walker said, he felt fear. “Mississippi was more dangerous then than anywhere else,” he said. “The lynchings, the students killed, so many bad things had happened in Mississippi.”
When the bus arrived in Jackson, the riders got off and walked into the terminal waiting room reserved for whites and were promptly arrested. The conditions in the overcrowded cells where they were imprisoned were appalling.
The following year, Wyatt Walker travelled to Birmingham to prepare for Project C, which stood for “confrontation”. “Dr. King said if we could crack Birmingham,” Walker said, “we could crack the South.”
Walker spent a year choreographing how the protests would unfold and the demonstrations became the turning point for the civil rights movement.
On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, King was arrested and spent eight days in jail.
Two weeks after King’s release, hundreds of black children streamed out of the 16th Street Baptist Church to demand integration and were met with fire hoses and snarling police dogs – images that shocked much of the country.The momentum from Birmingham fuelled a march on Washington, which took place on August 28, 1963. Walker walked the National Mall as day broke and watched black and white marchers gather by tens of thousands. They wore crisp dresses, strings of pearls, pressed suits and many carried signs demanding justice. Mahalia Jackson, who’d performed
whispered to King, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”
Walker recalled King swinging into his closing, his voice rising in his trademark oratorical style. Walker watched the crowd’s reaction as King described a world without segregation, without racism, without injustice. “It was a world-stage moment,” he said. And it forever changed the people who heard it. – Washington Post