Wyatt Tee Walker

Wyatt Tee Walker was born on the sixteenth of August 1928 at Brockton, Massachusetts — some records say 1929 — and raised at Merchantville, New Jersey. Virginia Union University at Richmond gave him a bachelor of science in chemistry and physics in 1950 and his divinity degree in 1953, and that year he took the pulpit of Gillfield Baptist Church at Petersburg, Virginia — where he led the local NAACP, directed Virginia's CORE, and founded the Petersburg Improvement Association on the Montgomery model, marching on the segregated library.

In 1960 Martin Luther King Jr. called him to be the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's first full-time executive director — the chief of staff who ran the machinery for four years. For Birmingham in 1963 he drafted Project C — for Confrontation: he timed the walking distances from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, counted the lunch-counter seats, planned the escalation phase by phase, and set the marches for the evening news. The campaign stood on Fred Shuttlesworth's seven years of Birmingham groundwork, and it was James Bevel's Children's Crusade that filled the jails — the plan, the foundation, and the fire together broke segregation's capital.

When King's answer to the white clergy came out of the Birmingham jail on scraps of newspaper margin and smuggled paper, it was Walker and his secretary, Willie Pearl Mackey, who spent days piecing the fragments together, transcribing and typing what the world knows as the Letter from Birmingham Jail. In the violence after the Gaston Motel bombing that May, a state trooper's carbine split his wife Ann's scalp; a reporter held Walker down, and likely saved his life.

From 1967 to 2004 he pastored Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem — installed with King preaching — served Governor Rockefeller on urban affairs, built senior housing on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, fought apartheid through the International Freedom Mobilization and the Religious Action Network, and wrote Somebody's Calling My Name, his 1979 study of Black sacred music, after a Colgate Rochester doctorate. He helped found New York's first charter school, Sisulu-Walker, in 1999, and died at Chester, Virginia on the twenty-third of January 2018, at eighty-nine. Honored be Wyatt Tee Walker, who drew the battle plan and pieced the Letter together.