RMC honors Martin Luther King Jr. with award to long-time associate
January 22, 2008 (Amy Condra, Mechanicsville Local)
(Photo by Ken Odor - Wyatt Tee Walker (left) and Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder chat during the program honoring the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
Last week Randolph-Macon College celebrated the birthday of slain civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by honoring Wyatt Tee Walker, who served as King’s executive assistant and the first full-time executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Randolph-Macon’s president, Robert R. Lindgren, welcomed about 450 people who gathered to pay tribute both to King, who inspired a vision of equality, and Walker, who has worked to make that dream a reality.
After being introduced by Lindgren, Walker joked, ““I probably won’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but this will do.”
Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, who had been at college with Walker in the late 1940s and early 50s, laughed as Walker turned to him and said, “Our classmates at Virginia Union didn’t have a clue that you’d become governor, and you probably didn’t have a clue that I’d become a minister. They say God works in mysterious ways!” Walker said that when he first went to Petersburg as a pastor, he carried a gun, “waiting for a racist to confront me so I could shoot him.
It was Martin Luther King who told me to put down my gun.” Wilder acknowledged the work of Walker, turning to his colleague and saying that, although he had never said it publicly or privately, “Tee, you’ve been an inspiration to me.” The mayor also offered what he promised would be a “candid, frank and honest” appraisal of recent remarks on civil rights made by presidential candidate Sen. Hilary Clinton. “We’re talking at a time of celebration, but a time when Dr. King’s name is being invoked by the presidential candidates,” he said. “I want to be as clear as I can. Nothing is decided in a vacuum… and the time for the American people to step up and to be a part of whatever is going on has long since passed.”
Wilder referenced Clinton’s recent suggestion that Dr. King’s dream “began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964” and that “it took a president to get it done.” “I’m not here to engage in political debate,” said Wilder, who has recently endorsed Clinton’s political rival, Barack Obama. He cited Johnson’s accomplishments, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his appointment of an African American to the Supreme Court, then added, “But King’s message stands separate and apart.” “King resurrected hope.
No one can ever underestimate the power of words and the role that they play in encouraging people to raise to the highest possibility of their potential.” The mayor called King a natural leader, one who “wasn’t selected to be a leader,” he said. “He was a leader.” Wilder noted that although it sometimes takes a catastrophe to prick the consciousness of a nation, that we must not wait for catastrophe to strike before politicians, parents and community leaders develop long range plans to address schools, crime.
Toward the end of the program, R-MC student Waddell S. Howard read Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech. Afterward, Walker said that initially they had decided not to use the speech, for fear that it has been repeated so frequently as to become “trite.” But, he said, when they heard Howard’s rendition, the power of the words prompted them to reconsider. King always had a genius for the moment, and great oratorical skill, said Walker.
Howard said that without the work of Dr. King and other civil rights activists such as Walker, he wouldn’t be doing the things he is allowed to do today. “I am very thankful as an African American man,” he said.