RIP Civil Rts giant Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker

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"The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who was chief of staff to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a key strategist behind civil rights protests that turned the tide against racial injustice in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, died early on Tuesday at an assisted-living facility near his home in Chester, Va. He was 88.
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Dr. Walker preached against intolerance and racial inequality for six decades from pulpits across the South, in New York City and in five of the world’s seven continents. He helped supervise South Africa’s first fully representative elections in 1994, when Nelson Mandela’s rise to power ushered in the end of the apartheid regime.
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Dr. Walker joined the fledgling Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961 and served until 1964 as its executive director and, unofficially, as Dr. King’s right-hand man. At the S.C.L.C., he devised a structured fund-raising strategy and organized numerous protests, including a series of anti-segregation boycotts and demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., that came to be known as Project C.

The C stood for “confrontation,” and the project is regarded as the blueprint for the civil rights movement’s success in the South.
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“I was fully committed to nonviolence, and I believe with all my heart that for the civil rights movement to prove itself, its nonviolent actions had to work in Birmingham,” he continued. “If it wasn’t for Birmingham, there wouldn’t have been a Selma march, there wouldn’t have been a 1965 civil rights bill. Birmingham was the birthplace and affirmation of the nonviolent movement in America.”

Dr. Walker helped circulate “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement, in which Dr. King argued for civil disobedience as a legitimate response to racial segregation. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

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During his long tenure at Canaan Baptist, in the heart of Harlem at 116th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Lenox Avenue, Dr. Walker oversaw extensive development of church-sponsored affordable housing, housing for the elderly and what the church calls the oldest senior services center in Harlem." (More at link)