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Walker is escorted by police out of the Petersburg Public Library in 1960 after "trespassing" in the whites-only section. (Photo courtesy the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Memorial Library, University of Richmond)
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1964 Jet Magazine cover (Image courtesy the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Memorial Library, University of Richmond)
Manuscripts from the personal collection of Wyatt Tee Walker, a Virginia Union University graduate and former Petersburg pastor who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., could be available to the public in the fall.
Walker, who died in January at age 88, donated his collection to the University of Richmond’s Boatwright Memorial Library in 2015. Reference and Processing Archivist Taylor McNeilly began working with the collection in September of last year.
Photographs of Walker and King — including those taken when the two were in jail in Birmingham, Alabama — along with their letters and audio recordings of sermons and speeches are some of the highlights of the collection. McNeilly says their correspondence shows the “nitty-gritty” of the operations of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization instrumental to the civil rights movement.
The size of the collection makes the archiving process a lengthy one, but McNeilly says as much of the collection as possible will eventually be fully accessible to the public.
Walker wasn’t part of the “major narrative” of the civil rights movement, McNeilly says, but he organized many of the efforts in Petersburg and served as King’s chief of staff from 1960-64. “I think that this is going to be, if not a real game changer, then it’s going to still shed a lot of light [on the civil rights movement],” he says.
In an oral history interview conducted by Joseph Evans, dean and professor of preaching at the Morehouse School of Religion, Walker described his role in the movement this way: “I was just a participant in what I think was the unfinished revolution of 1776. I feel a sense of fulfillment that I had a key role in desegregating America.”
