What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People?: The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership

Afterword

369 Afterword ROBERT C. SMITH The purpose of this volume is to assess the impact and influence of Ronald Walters’ work on black politics, thought, and leadership ; to provide a critical assessment of the life and career of one of the most consequential political scientists in the history of the discipline . We also prepared this volume to preserve Walters’ legacy for the next generations of students, scholars, activists, leaders, and public intellectuals. Over the years, Walters trained many students—two generations are represented in this volume—but for the future this book may serve as an introduction to his work as well as a study in the sociology of knowledge. Similarly, over the years Walters counseled, advised, and strategized with two generations of black leaders and activists of all ideological stripes. Many of those leaders and activists have passed or are passing away and are being replaced by new generations of leaders and activists unfamiliar with Walters’ work and the struggles out of which it emerged.1 Thus, another purpose of this volume is to make available to future generations of activists and leaders the broad outlines of the work of a man who in the past half century contributed much to the understanding, evolution, and development of black power in the United States.2 In a small way this volume is a substitute for the memoir Walters did not get around to and anticipates biographies that might yet be written. When Walters begin his career there were perhaps sixty-five black PhD-trained political scientists in the United States,3 and concerns 370 Robert C. Smith about race were marginal to the discipline. In 2010 the American Political Science Association estimated that African Americans constituted 5 percent of the nearly ten thousand PhD-trained political scientists in the United States.4 And “The historical devaluation of Afro-American politics as a subject worthy of study is no longer the norm in the discipline.”5 On the contrary, “During the past thirty years, the status and recognition given to scholarship on race, racism and Afro-American politics has gradually improved . . . culminat[ing] in a virtual explosion of scholarship on race, racism and Afro-American politics during the last twenty-five years.”6 When Walters entered the profession, probably no more than a half dozen books by political scientists on race had been published in the United States; Walters published as many during his career. Thus, when he died there was long-overdue receptivity to work by scholars on race. Yet, much of this scholarship tends to be divorced from activism, divorced from empowering the black community in its continuing struggle for a racially just society. In 2007 Wilbur Rich edited a collection of essays, African American Perspectives on Political Science. In his chapter he wrote political science as a discipline “does not reward scholars who are activist. . . . Indeed, being perceived as being too close to politics is frowned upon.”7 The emergent “perestroika” movement has challenged this apolitical, irrelevant political science.8 But the norm prevails, and Rich writes that the “lure of academic heaven” (an appointment at an elite university) prevents many black political scientists from engaging in the kind of activism that characterized the work of Walters.9 Mack Jones, the founding president of NCOBPS and the founding chair of Atlanta University’s PhD program in political science, was with Walters a key figure in the development of an activist-oriented black science of politics during the 1970s.10 In an address in 1989 commemorating NCOBPS’ twentieth anniversary, Jones concluded that black political scientists appeared to have succumbed to the “seductions of the mainstream.”11 Rich contends that the lure of academic heaven even “serves to discipline the behavior and research of professors at lesser known universities.”12 The black political science of a Walters, a Jones, or a Hanes Walton did not emerge in a vacuum. Political thought never does. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his great history of Western philosophy, “philosophy [is] an integral part of social and political life, not the Afterword 371 isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished.”13 Walters was a remarkable individual, but he also came of age in a most remarkable period of African American history—the tumultuous, rebellious black 1960s. This era of revolt was effect and cause of his...