Brother Ron Walters joined the ancestors on September 10, 2010. Over the past fifty years he has participated as a scholar activist in all areas of the global Pan African movement. From his early years in Kansas as a youth in the movement against Jim Crow he was involved in demonstrations and sit-ins.  Brother Ron Walters emerged as a major international spokesperson for reparations, peace and social justice. He was at the forefront of the campaigns of the African Liberation Support Committee in the early 1970s and was a participant at the World Conference against Racism in Durban thirty years later. He wrote passionately against the Apartheid bomb and worked to build a grassroots movement within Trans Africa to oppose global apartheid. As one of the activists behind the anti apartheid struggles he saw firsthand the response of the system to the activities of Congressman Charles Diggs who carried forth the anti apartheid work from the Halls of Congress. Serving as a Senior Adviser for Diggs, Walters sharpened the international understandings of the Rhodesian and apartheid regimes. He was at the base of the mobilization of blacks to exercise their right to participate in the political system in the United States and wrote extensively on the political processes in the United States. As one of the forces behind the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson campaigns in 1984, and 1988. Ron Walters wanted to carry forward the struggles for full democratic rights.  While he is better known for his scholarly writings on Black Presidential Politics in America: a Strategic Approach, Ron Walters was committed to the struggles against institutionalized racism and eugenics. He elaborated on this form of racism in the book, White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (African American Life Series). This book can assist us in understanding the rabid racist movement that is seeking to dominate public spaces in the United States. Ron Walters opposed white supremacy, white nationalism and racism and worked hard to alert students to the realities of the US state system. It was his objective to work for a new society where all humans live in dignity. His support for the rights of oppressed peoples led him to articulate a brand of Pan Africanism that supported the rights of oppressed blacks and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world. Walters supported the rights of self determination of the Palestinian Peoples.  His scholarship and activism stand as a beacon for those who want to understand the meaning of commitment. He struggled hard to break the conservative stranglehold of mainstream Political Scientists.

Struggles within the academy

The biographical notes of the work of Ron Walters tell the story of a scholar who has been toiling for change while he was a teenager. He participated in all forms of opposition to racism and segregation. Whether it was his activity as the president of the Youth Chapter of the NAACP or as a budding scholar, Ron had marked a path for struggle since his undergraduate days at Fisk University. It turned out that his fruitful years at Fisk led him to work closely with Charles Diggs another Fisk graduate.  On speaking to his close friend and colleague James Turner today, James underscored the long history of Ron’s involvement in the black liberation struggles. Long before the national sit-ins of the youths in Greensboro, North Carolina made national and international news, Ron Walters as a teenager had been organizing against racism in the South.

James Turner who was full of grief for his close friend and colleague also commented on the humility of Ron Walters.  Dr. John Johnson who was a colleague of Ron Walters when he taught at Syracuse University in 1969 has also spoken of his passion and work among the youth on an off campus. Ron Walters was very clear that Black students on white campuses had a special responsibility and John Johnson recalled the electric presentation of Ron Walters on the question of Black Awareness in Higher Education. This was the period of the black uprisings on the campuses of Cornell and Syracuse Universities in upstate New York.
For those who did not know Ron Walters it is now possible to get Ron’s view of his growth as a Scholar from the Oral History Interview with Ronald W. Walters. Conscious of the role of orature in preserving the history and culture of Africans, Brother Ron had provided an 8 part video of the history of his life. 

Like the late John Henrik Clarke, Brother Ron Walters worked in a tradition that fused African knowledge systems with his formal training in the western academy. As a communicator, Ron Walters was continuously working, traveling speaking, advocating, fighting and proposing peace and reparations.

Writing in the Preface of his book, Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (African American Life Series), he described his early days as a student and activist.  Ron said that his ‘first awareness of Pan Africanism occurred in 1963 when, as a senior at Fisk University, I wrote an essay entitled the Blacks which won a Readers Digest national essay competition.” From this preface he elaborated on his association with the Pan African Movement and his work with Jimmy Garret, the late Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Amiri Baraka, Courtland Cox, Howard Fuller (Owusu Sadauki) and William Strickland. Ron also wrote of his activities within the African Heritage Studies Association  (AHSA) and his relationship with other Pan Africanists such as James Turner, the late John Henrik Clarke, Ron Karenga, Doctor Ben,  Leonard Jeffries Molefi Asante and countless others. This formation, the AHSA had been the effort of those who opposed the domination of African Studies Association by those who served the interests of empire. Ron had been trained at the American University but he broke with the traditions that placed scholarship in the service of oppressors. Ron was also a founding member of the National Black Political Science Association.

Professor Ronald Walters was one of the few senior Political Scientists who challenged head on the efforts to marginalize Pan Africanism by the foundations and those who are the gatekeepers in the academy. This was a major battle at a moment when the State Department and the foundations had mobilized the modernizers to distort the true meaning of Pan Africanism.  Prior to World War II scholars such as C. L. R James, George Padmore, W.E.B Dubois, and countless others had linked Pan Africanism to the anti-racist struggles globally. This brand of Pan Africanism was anti-imperialist and anti-fascist. Britain understood the strength and power of this brand of Pan Africanism. The British tolerated these Pan Africanists during the struggles against Hitler and Mussolini but worked to undermine and co-opt this Pan Africanism after the War.  British academicians entered the discussion on Pan Africanism seeking to determine the trajectory of research, scholarship and activism on Pan Africanism with some making the distinction between Pan Africanism with a big P and Pan Africanism with a small p.

Pan Africanism within the United States was linked directly to the lived experiences of the peoples of African descent so the ruling forces in the USA worked very hard to redefine the meaning of Pan Africanism and to inscribe it within the ideological battles of the Cold war. After World War II, leading scholars of Political Science such as Joseph Nye and David Apter were involved in research and writing on Pan Africanism. Melville Herkovits had established a tradition among liberals that Africans could not be serious scholars on Africa and Pan Africanism because of their emotional attachment to Africa. Herskovits had dismissed Dubois as a propagandist and political activist, rather than a serious scholar. This dismissal was to ensure that liberal whites dominated the research and teaching spaces within the leading universities in the USA.

Ron Walters was entering the field of Political Science in the generation after DuBois when the ‘philanthropists’ and governmental institutions were bent on funding scholarship that would perpetuate white hegemony in the white academy. Pan Africanism had to seek refuge in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in order to survive the storms of the ideological onslaught of the oppressors.  

David Apter was writing on Ghana, Nkrumah and Pan Africanism, while building an organization called the American Society of African Culture.  It later turned out that this organization was heavily funded by the intelligence agencies and the foundations.  Ron Walters belonged to that group of scholars, black and white who were opposed to the mobilization of the social sciences for military purposes. Research work by thinkers for the empire was bent on distorting the history of Pan Africanism. Under the direction of noted political scientists such as David Apter and John Marcum there was a major study entitled, Pan Africanism Reconsidered. Other venerable political scientists such as Joseph Nye had written on Pan Africanism and Integration in East Africa at a moment when the Nkrumah project of African unity was still on the international agenda.

Ron Walters opposed the links between the intelligence agencies and the Professors of the American Political Science Association. There was a major rupture within the African Studies Association meeting in Montreal in 1969 and the AHSA was formed to bring Pan Africanism back to its base among those who opposed racism, colonialism and apartheid. It was in this same period in 1969 when Ron joined those black Political Scientists who formed the National Black Political Science Association.

After the rupture within the African Studies Association in 1969 the subject of Pan Africanism was dropped by mainstream Political Scientists but Andrew Apter followed in the footsteps of his father when he wrote the book, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (University of Chicago Press). Subsequent to this early period, the study of Pan Africanism fell under the rubric of Black Studies and mainstream political scientists relegated this subject to the backburner. In this period it was unfashionable among those on the rise within the system to write and speak about the global Pan African struggles. Ron Walters refused to go along with this tide and carried his passion for justice to the centers of intellectual debate.

Research funds from the major foundations dried up. Funding from the Department of Education disappeared. There were few centers where graduate students could do doctoral research in this field of study. Ron Walters directed one such center when he served as a professor of Political Science at Howard University. From this base he trained a new generation of thinkers and activists and those who were inspired to link the local to the global.

Pan Africanism and the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC)

As a committed intellectual, Ron Walters did not confine his work to Howard University campus and the politics of the University; he was one of the key thinkers behind the work of those leaders who later founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He served as an adviser for Congressman Charles Diggs who waged a relentless battle from the floor of the US Congress against US support for the illegal Rhodesian government of Ian Smith. It was while working with Charles Diggs, Shirley Chisholm, Charles Rangel, Louis Stokes and others that the Pan African struggles to boycott Chrome from Rhodesia took the spotlight in the USA. Ron Walters also wrote on the Apartheid Bomb. His book, South Africa and the Bomb: Responsibility and Deterrence became a reference for the anti-apartheid campaign and he wrote scholarly articles and op-ed pieces about the military support of the US government for the oppression of blacks in Africa. This work at the academic level was being done while Walters functioned as an activist within the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) He was later to be one of the anchors for the formation of the TransAfrica Forum. Today, the US government is working hard to sow confusion about humanitarianism and the so called War on Terror in Africa to disguise the new efforts to militarize Africa. Scholars such as Ron Walters was opposed to the US military engagement with oppressors in Africa and of the more than 100 scholarly articles that he published, his most fruitful period of publication were those years when he was fighting apartheid in the USA and in Africa. At that moment, Ron was organically linked to the Black liberation movement. Without a movement such as the African Liberation Support Committee, today the US government has established the US Africa Command, headed by a Black General who struts around Africa under the guise of supporting peace and good governance.

The ALSC represented one of the highest point of the organizing for Pan African liberation in the second part of the twentieth century. The energy and spirit of the people were manifest in demonstrations, protests, books, films, and other forms of political statements on the struggles in Africa and the struggles of Africans in the Diaspora. Ron Walters was one of those who were caught in this ferment with the ideological explosions that came from such a dynamic moment. Many ‘scholars’ did not survive to continue in the movement for liberation. Divisions over ‘ideological lines’ blurred deeper divisions among those who maintained clarity of the long term needs of liberation and liberation support. Ron Walters used all the resources available to support the ALSC and was in the midst of these deliberations of the future of liberation and emancipation.

The full history of the ALSC is still to be excavated and Ron himself has provided his own insight into this period in his book on Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (African American Life Series). This was a period when Black political representatives were challenged to link the opposition to apartheid in South Africa to the apartheid conditions inside the United States. This was a period where those from the Black political spaces dominated the news on the opposition to apartheid and colonialism. So incensed were the ruling forces in the USA that they worked hard to silence Charles Diggs and removed him from Congress. Diggs had used his position in Congress to work with the ALSC and the forces of freedom to expose US corporations that were profiting from the exploitation of black labor.

Throughout the 1970s Ron Walters worked tirelessly on the questions of the illegal Ian Smith Regime and was one of the founders of the TransAfrica formation. The ruling class in the USA was threatened by this form of activism and worked to discredit and frustrate those involved in these formations. It was in this climate that Charles Diggs was charged with taking kickbacks in 1978. Removing Diggs was an effort to silence the anti-apartheid forces from the center of national organizing. The system sought to humiliate not only Diggs but the entire black liberation forces in order to prop up white supremacy at home and abroad.

Ron Walters understood all of this and he redoubled his work to find spaces to oppose racism. In the 1980s he was a close adviser to the Jesse Jackson Campaign. There are many who worked closely with this aspect of the life of Ron Walters and I will not dwell on that aspect in this short reflection.

The Reparations Movement

The book on the experiences of blacks in the political system was a warning of the limits of electoral politics. So while immersed inside the same electoral politics, Ron Walters was writing about the limitations of the same electoral process. He spelt out the need for multiple forms of struggle in the book, Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics (American Political Challenges) . After his involvement with the politics of the established political system, Ron Walters was writing for the younger generation to alert them that the democratic facade of elections concealed greater challenges for society. I remember I 2007 when Ron came up to Syracuse to speak on the Obama phenomenon, we spent hours reflecting on the need for a movement that would be clear as to the need to work inside and outside the system.  Ron Walters wrote weekly columns where he elaborated on the need for multiple forms of struggle. He helped to prepare us to develop the needed strategies to combat the neo-fascist forces who are now mobilizing under the banner of the Tea Party. From the scholarship of Ron Walters we understand that the Tea Party Nation is only one manifestation of the deep racism of this society. His book on White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (African American Life Series) outlined the institutionalized forms of racism and the dangers for black and brown peoples. It is now urgent for the engaged scholar activists to grasp the dangers of the forms of populism of the Tea party in a period of an extended capitalist depression. It was for this reason that while he was on his deathbed, Ron Walters found his voice to speak out forcefully against the Glen Beck work to manipulate the memory and meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ron Walters worked hard for the rights of the peoples of Haiti, the peoples of Brazil and for oppressed peoples all over the world. In the second half of the twentieth century Ron Walters worked to show that there should be no distinction between theory and practice. When there were sections of the black middle class working to domesticate black politics in the service of the Democratic Party and in the service of empire, Ron Walters redoubled his efforts to fight for peace and justice internationally. He served with those who campaigned for reparative justice in the United States and castigated those congressional members from the Black Community who retreated from the demands of the World Conference against Racism. When the Durban II conference was convened in April 2009, Ron was again advocating and popularizing the Program of Action of Durban.

When I started writing my book on Barack Obama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA, I alerted Ron that I was embarking on this task. He supported and encouraged me and was always full of optimism borne out of concrete experience in the struggle. I requested him to write a blurb for the book and he readily accepted sending back the words of solidarity that now graces this book. I was not to know then that Ron was terminally ill because he did not share his pain with us. He worked up to the last moments of his life. Ron Walters wanted to repair the destruction of human lives. He wanted society to understand the crimes of slavery and racism. The world is a better place because he was with us.

Click here to send a condolence message to the family of Ron Walters.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Dr. Horace Campbell, PhD, is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse New York. He is the author of Barack Obama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA  Click here to contact Dr. Campbell.

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