I don’t remember when I first met Ron Walters because I feel that I have known him practically all my adult political life. So trying now to sum up his meaning I find quite impossible because, besides tearing up, I feel there is little I can add to the emails of sorrow and praise and admiration that I have read from his friends and colleagues, former students, elected officials, or just ordinary folk who may have seen him on TV or heard him on the radio and appreciated his explanations of political events - and processes - that it was not intended that the people understand.

As for me, Ron was my better political half because when I would come across some particularly outrageous example of America’s racial duplicity and called him to vent, Ron was always much more calm over America’s transgressions than I could ever be.

At the same time, Ron was a superlative “race man” who believed, like Dubois, that the role of the intellectual was to put scholarship in service to the struggle. So Ron related, without prejudice, to practically the whole black political spectrum: to the nationalists and to the black Democrats; to the panafricanists and the reparationists; to the community organizers and the student groups; to the Congressional Black Caucus and to the man and woman in the street. Moreover there was no political project which might further the interests of the race which he was unwilling to aid.

That is why I call him “the people’s intellectual,” the scholar who studied the system and unfrocked it so that we might understand the reality of the society we need to change...Not “conservatism,” but white nationalism. Not “post-racial society” but post-modern racism. Without rant and without venom, Ron spoke truth to power...He was our gift, who Yahweh has now called home.

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member William L. (Bill) Strickland Teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank in Atlanta the Institute of the Black World (IBW), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (PBS Mini Series Boxed Set) , and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, The American Experience: Malcolm X: Make It Plain . He also wrote the companion book Malcolm X: Make It Plain . Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois - W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Click here to contact Mr. Strickland.