BlackCommentator.com In Struggle Spotlight - Ron Walters, A Scholar Activist Who Mattered By Peter Gamble

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.