In Struggle
Spotlight
Ron Walters
A Scholar Activist Who Mattered
By Peter Gamble
BlackCommentator.com Publisher
This issue of BlackCommentator.com is dedicated to remembrances of Dr. Ron Walters, PhD. Brother Ron was a member of the BlackCommentator.com Editorial board and a BC columnist. He was a noted Educator and political analyst and activist. The title of his BC column was "African American Leadership" - a subject he studied, wrote about and taught. He was a warrior in the struggle for social justice, economic justice and peace. Ron Walters was 72. He died Friday night, September 10, 2010 after a long battle with lung cancer.
Ron was a very private man. So private that he did not tell very many people about his cancer diagnosis and treatment. In speaking with several of his close friends, I have reached the conclusion that his silence about the cancer was not just the behavior of a private man, but an act of courage because he did not want conversations about his illness to distract from his work as an activist.
Ron was a fan of tennis. A number of his final hours were spent watching, from his hospital bed, the U.S. open on TV . He also insisted on using his laptop and the hospital WIFI system to communicate with friends and colleagues right up the the end, when the cancer overtook him.
As impressive as Ron's credentials were, he was a regular guy. Everyone I've ever spoken to about him told me he was easy to approach and eager for an exchange of views. This was also my experience.
I never met Ron face to face. I knew him for years through his writings. When he became a columnist for BC and joined our Editorial Board he became a friend and colleague. I spoke with Ron numerous times on the telephone, interviewed him several times and enjoyed about a half dozen long conversations on politics and history. In each of our extended talks, Ron always emphasized the importance of political action on the local level as the first step towards bringing about change.
His most famous early "action" experience is a part of American history. Here is a statement from the Wichita, KS NAACP about the Dockum drug store sit-in:
As the President of the Wichita NAACP Youth Council in July of 1958, Dr. Walters led the group as they conducted the first successful student-led sit-in of the Civil Rights movement. Sit-Ins were not an approved tactic of the NAACP in 1958 so when the Branch and Youth council asked for the support of the National Office, they were turned down. It required an extraordinary amount of courage for Ron as the Youth President and Chester Lewis, the branch President, to press forward over the objections of the National Office.
When the sit-in ended in August of that same year, the Dockum drug store on the corner of Broadway and Douglass in Wichita Kansas was integrated - along with the entire Rexall Drug store chain and all its subsidiaries. Following the success of the Dockum Sit-In, the Oklahoma City Branch Youth Council conducted a sit-in that August. From there, the tactic spread throughout the Midwest. In 1960, a group of young men and women from SNCC conducted a sit-in in Greensboro North Carolina which many mistakenly believe to have been the first...
Dr. Walters went on to become known throughout the world for his knowledge of African American politics and leadership. He headed the African American Leadership Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program of the University of Maryland, served as Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and retired as Professor Emeritus of the University of Maryland College Park.
Dr. Walters was a dear friend, a supporter, and a mentor, and he will be sorely missed... July 1938 - September 2010
In 2009, a National History Day senior individual documentary was produced by Sjobor Hammer, Topeka High School about the Sit-In. It was titled: With Dignity and Purpose: Ron Walters and the Sit-in at Dockum Drug Store.
Wichita public television station KPTS produced a documentary titled: The Dockum Sit-in: A Legacy of Courage. Click here to view the complete KPTS documentary.
The first African American Leadership column by Ron, published on BC, was: The Time for a Revolution December 18, 2008. It contained the following statement:
I believe that a revolutionary approach to the current crises is absolutely necessary, since what has happened to America is not just the fault of a few bad decisions, but a structural crisis, produced by a way of thinking about privilege and the use of power. Events from Katrina to the present, have uncovered the inability of government institutions to address the needs of people because they were not fundamentally structured for that purpose, but to serve powerful interests.
Although Ron was elated by the election of the first African American president, he believed very strongly that we must make it clear to Obama that we will not be taken for granted:
Indeed, if Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Clinton had felt that considering ethnicity in governance was a “mistake” what would be the character of black progress? The issue here is that these presidents did not deal with African American issues out of the goodness of their own hearts, but because there was a national crisis that called for it, or because blacks pushed them to the wall. The latter has been one of the routine answers to the question of whether President Obama would deal earnestly with problems faced by the black community, given that many whites expected that he would conduct his administration by handing out favors to them. No doubt, Obama feels he must guard against that in order to maintain white votes, but it puts blacks in a box, the only route out of which is to “make him do it.”
Ron was always on alert for unfair treatment of Black folks as demonstrated by his writings about discrimination in oil clean up projects in the Gulf:
It seems to me that a civil rights operation needs to move into the oil clean-up operation that bring about a strong element of fairness to that situation. When Katrina hit, we heard that the companies involved in the clean-up were importing workers from Korea, Mexico and Vietnam at the lowest wages to work the reconstruction. Many of them are still there and they provide competition with many workers who actually live in the area and have been deprived not just of a job, but of their entire livelihood if things don’t improve. They have the most stake in the outcome of the reconstruction.
Click here for the complete commentary from which the above quote was taken.
He was not an apologist for Obama:
Black leaders must stop waiting on Obama to deliver jobs and challenge those with the financial resources to distribute them fairly in creating employment.
What if they stopped waiting on Obama to deliver jobs and challenged those with the financial resources he provided to distribute them fairly in creating employment? Many firms, such as the Atlanta-based Choate Construction company are practicing out-and-out employment discrimination and they get away with it because HUD approves their “diversity” numbers – a concept that doesn’t have to include Blacks at all. The remedy here may be to bring more law suits.
Click here for the complete commentary from which the above quote was taken.
He saw the Shirley Sherrod incident as a lack of competence by the Obama White House:
First Rev. Wright, then Van Jones, Acorn, the New Black Panthers, now Breitbart all lead to the conclusion that this White House is inept in the handling of racial issues. Since the culture war against it will not stop, it should develop the capacity and the confidence to face it down.
Click here for the complete commentary from which the above quote was taken.
Walters also defended Obama:
The problem with being President of the United States is that ultimately the big problems will land in your lap and so, whether or not Obama inherited a horrendous set of problems, they eventually will become his the longer they go unresolved. The difficulty here is trying determine whether this happens naturally or whether people are placing things in his lap in a blame circus designed to complicate his governance and eventually bring him down.
Click here for the complete commentary from which the above quote was taken.
And Ron believed the debate over immigration reform was far too narrow:
For my money the debate over immigration reform is far too narrow. Our civil rights leaders have followed the predictable dynamic created by Hispanics who have justly mobilized to normalize their status in America. We should support them because the stakes of strengthening our coalition at this moment in history will bear substantial fruit as both groups become a larger part of American society, its political system and its economy. So, it is a civil rights struggle to oppose the racist law passed by the Arizona legislature to profile Hispanics and relate any illegal acts to their immigration status.
Nevertheless, it is also a civil rights struggle to use this moment to finally eliminate the racism in immigration law in general. This means that our take on immigration reform should be addressed more clearly and forcibly to creating fair opportunities for people of African descent to enter this Country along with everyone else.
Click here for the complete commentary from which the above quote was taken.
Ron was known for schooling reporters about the exacting details of interpreting polls and the real intention behind political machinations. As a dedicated scholar, political strategist and teacher, his primary aim was to educate as many people as he could about the importance and practical consequences of public policy in the African-American community. He was a man whose academic record and analytical insights contributed to America's understanding of the intersection of race, politics and policy.
Whenever someone came to him in an excited state, demanding an immediate solution or result about a current issue or political development, Ron would say something like "let's calm down and take a look at the issue from an historical perspective and see where we are right now."
Ron was very aware of individuals who considered his views to be those of an "old" civil rights horse, knew there were people who considered him an apologist for Barack Obama. He was not bothered by disagreement; in fact, he welcomed a good debate, if the opponent was willing to examine historical facts as part of the discussion.
Ron did not appreciate incipient thoughts, that is, ideas that are only partly in existence or imperfectly formed, being present as conclusion. He always took the approach of an intellectual scholar.
Dr. Ronald W. Walters is going to be sincerely missed. He was a thoughtful, loving, intellectual man who worked to educate and encourage others to play a role in the struggle for economic justice, social justice and peace.
Funeral services for Dr. Ronald W. Walters will take place in Washington, D.C. On Sunday, Sept. 19, a memorial service will be held at Howard University, On Monday, Sept. 20, the funeral service will be held at the historic Shiloh Baptist Church, over which the Rev. Jesse Jackson will officiate. Burial services will be held at Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Md.Sunday, September 19
Memorial Service
Howard University, Cramton Auditorium
3 - 4pm Public viewing
4 - 5pm Memorial ServiceMonday, September 20
Funeral Service
Shiloh Baptist Church
1500 9th Street, NW
10 - 11am Public Viewing
11am - 12n Funeral ServiceBurial Service
Gates of Heaven Cemetery
13801 Georgia Ave.
Immediately following funeral servicesThe Wichita NAACP and the Kansas African-American Museum in Wichita will host a memorial service to honor Walters on Sept. 26 at the museum.
Click here to send a condolence message to the family of Ron Walters.
BlackCommentator.com Publisher and Chief Technical Officer, Peter Gamble, is the recipient of a national Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in journalism and numerous other honors for excellence in reporting and investigative reporting. The “beats” he covered as a broadcast journalist ranged from activism in the streets, to the State Department and White House. The lure of a personal computer on his desk inspired a career change in 1985 and an immersion into what he saw as the future of communications. The acquisition of computer programming skills made it possible for Peter to achieve an important level of self-reliance in the technology of the 21st century and to develop BlackCommentator.com. Click here to contact Peter.
