The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and continued to work for civil rights after King’s death, has died at age 88.
Walker died Tuesday at an assisted-living facility near his Chester, Virginia, home, according to The New York Times. Walker was the pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem and also assisted New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller as an advocate for affordable housing and better schools in low-income areas of New York City.
Walker met King while they were both students in the early 1950s, and he served as King’s unofficial right-hand man and executive director at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s. Through fundraising strategies and a series of protests, Walker built the framework for nonviolent confrontation that led to civil rights gains and societal change through the 1960s and ’70s, The New York Times reported.
The influential “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was circulated with help from Walker, and the activist also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington during which King gave the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, The New York Times reported.
Walker “knew how to harness the energies of people who were excited about social change, and how to use the church as the center of his advocacy for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, The New York Times reported.
Walker also preached around the world about racial inequality and helped overturn apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, the New York Daily News reported. He became the first chairman of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and wrote 29 books during his tenure at Canaan Baptist.
“We are saddened by the passing of Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, the Daily News reported. “He was a fighter for freedom who dedicated his life to bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”
Mourners paid their repects on Twitter and reached out with condolences and memories of Walker.
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