BRIAN CHILSON
NEWS & POLITICS
In memoriam: John W. Walker THE LAW WAS ON HIS SIDE.
J
BY ERNEST DUMAS
ohn W. Walker, a state representative and longtime civil-rights warrior who died in his sleep the morning of Oct. 28 at the age of 82, would have to be described as a politician since he spent 60 years tilting at the political institutions in his state and actually ran for public office himself six times. But he was the rare and perhaps unique politician who didn’t care at all for popularity and seemed even to court resentment, if not hatred. He found resentment and hatred in full measure but also, in the end, a small measure of goodwill among those who had been eternally vexed at his unrelenting championing of equality for African Americans in the public schools and colleges, public institutions and workforce — vexed at his methods at least, if not his goals. His lawsuits — scores of them in federal and state courts all across the state — would cost millions and millions of dollars to defend and nearly always in a losing cause. The law — the Constitution — was on his side. Now John Walker ought to be accorded the recognition that he deserves. Arkansas has a few icons from the civil rights movement, notably Daisy and L.C. Bates, but Walker did more than anyone in history to bring a measure of equality and fairness to the social and economic institutions of the state. We are
open to suggestions about the form of that recognition — no holiday, like Martin Luther King’s, but something ... maybe an equestrian statue of him somewhere — the square at Bentonville? — to replace a Confederate monument. We have come a long way in Arkansas and everywhere else, though not far enough, since Walker began his quest for equal justice in the mid-’60s and began slapping lawsuits on school boards, state institutions and big corporations like Walmart and Georgia Pacific that denied black children and adults equal opportunity and the just fruits of their labor. Walker went to a poor school for black kids at Hope, got accepted at the University of Texas but then was denied admission when it was discovered that he was a Negro, then got a degree at Arkansas’s only public college for blacks (Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College), and a master’s degree in education from the prestigious New York University. Walker was actually qualified to be the state education commissioner in 2015 when Governor Hutchinson got the state’s legal qualifications for the job eliminated so that he could hire the politician Johnny Key as the education czar. Walker got a law degree from Yale University, the celebrated school that produces most U.S. Supreme Court justices, including men like ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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