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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.
Click
here
to send a condolence message to the family of Ron Walters.
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.
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Sep 16, 2010 - Issue 393
is
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