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

Introduction

1 Introduction ROBERT C. SMITH For more than a decade I tried to persuade Walters to write his memoirs. Indeed, in my last email communication with him days before he entered the hospital for the last time I raised the issue. I was writing in response to his “Reflections” essay published in this volume and wrote that the essay “gets me to thinking of the perhaps not so dead horse I’ve been beating for lo these many years—you need to write the MEMOIR man—you owe it to the young, and to the intellectual and political understanding of one of the most critical periods of our history.”1 In trying to persuade him to write the memoir, I would occasionally compare him with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the distinguished liberal historian and political activist who in 2000 published the first volume of his memoirs.2 Although he did not particularly care for the comparison, I would say, “Through Schlesinger’s writings and career one can trace the history of postwar liberalism in the United States, and through your writings and career we can trace the history of post–civil rights era black politics in America.”3 Walters would always respond by saying something like “no one is interested in reading about me,” or “I am not interested in writing about me,” or “maybe I will get to it when I finish my book on” whatever he was working on at the time. Unfortunately, he died before he could “get to it” if indeed he ever would have gotten to it. This is unfortunate, because as uncomfortable as he might have been with the comparison to Schlesinger, his memoir would have been to black politics what Schlesinger’s was to American liberalism. 2 Robert C. Smith That is, his-story was not about him but about history; a history that, like Schlesinger, he not only chronicled but shaped. Indeed, Walters ’ history goes back to the civil rights era itself, for in 1958 at the age of twenty when he was president of the NAACP Youth Council in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, he helped to organize the first modern lunch counter sit-in.4 This was almost two years before the more famous Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in, which historians view as a pivotal event in the development of the protest phase of the civil rights movement and the eventual passage of the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s.5 At the time of his death in September 2011 at the age of seventy-three, Walters was internationally recognized as the foremost scholar of race politics in the United States and as the most influential strategist in black politics since Bayard Rustin.6 From Wichita to Washington Ronald William Walters was born in Wichita on July 20, 1938. The eldest son in a family of seven children, his father was Gilmar “Butler ” Walters, a “Buffalo Soldier,” Tuskegee airman and a professional musician. His mother, Maxine, was a civil rights investigator for the state of Kansas. Walters’ parents were racially conscious and socially active, which as Robert Newby discusses in his chapter in this volume, undoubtedly influenced his engagement with politics and civil rights. After graduating from Fisk University, Walters earned a PhD in political science from American University. In the late 1960s he established and became founding chair of the first African American Studies program at Brandeis. In the early 1970s he became chairman of Howard University’s Political Science Department, helping to turn it into one of the two leading academic centers for the study of African American politics. A prolific writer, he authored more than one hundred articles and seven books, including important studies on the theory and practice of Pan Africanism, on African American leadership, on strategies for black participation in presidential elections, on reparations , and on the resurgence of conservatism as an expression of white ethnic nationalism. In addition to his scholarly writings, Walters was the leading interpreter of African American politics in the national media. He wrote articles in most of the leading newspapers Introduction 3 and appeared on virtually all of the national television and radio news and commentary programs (appearing a record ninety-one times on C-SPAN). His column on black politics was syndicated by the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). He also worked as a roving correspondent for NNPA, covering major national and international events. He was also...