Photo courtesy Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History
"There were about 14 of us packed in the cell — it could really only fit three or four people. We slept on the floor, which was filthy and damp. At night, the bugs would crawl all over me, and the big light stayed on all night; they never turned that light off.”
Theresa Ann Walker can now talk freely about her stints in jail nearly 60 years ago. For decades after her release, the result of multiple arrests for her fearless freedom fighting during the civil rights era, “I couldn’t speak about that time. It was too painful,” she says.
Walker, 90, is the widow of Wyatt Tee Walker, a civil rights leader whose memory will be honored on the Emancipation Proclamation and Freedom Monument to be placed on Brown’s Island this December. The world knows her husband as Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man and as the brilliant strategist behind pivotal moments of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Before becoming pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, a role he held for 37 years, he served as pastor at Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg and Mount Level Baptist Church in Dinwiddie for eight years.
“He was a serious pastor,” Theresa Walker says. “He took his church work seriously, and he would give anybody the shirt off his back.” While pastoring at Canaan, he continued his activism, heading an effort of community leaders in successfully advocating for the development of a $100 million affordable housing project in Harlem. The University of Richmond, where the Rev. Walker donated his personal collection of historical papers, essays and memorabilia, held a Wyatt Tee Walker Symposium in October, marking the start of a yearlong series of programs under the theme “Contested Spaces: Race, Nation and Conflict.” In March, a conference titled “1919 and Its Legacies” will discuss the effects of national and international racial violence and anti-colonialism. The university recently released an oral history recorded in 2016 with the Walkers.
Theresa Walker (center) talks with University of Richmond President Ronald A. Crutcher at the Wyatt Tee Walker Symposium in October. (Photo by Jamie Betts courtesy University of Richmond, University Communications)
Throughout her husband’s career, Theresa Walker worked quietly and earnestly beside him, applying the skills she learned as a teen to enact decades of nonviolent civil rights activism. The Walkers met as freshman students at Virginia Union University.
“We met at a Green Tea social,” the Chester resident remembers. “I was sitting at the piano, and he came up and started talking to me. We realized we were both from New Jersey, and my family knew his.” That December, at a candlelight service at Moore Street Baptist Church, “he took my hand, and asked if I would marry him.” The lovebirds exchanged vows in December 1950.
Theresa Walker was born in 1928 to Mabel Elizabeth Burke Edwards, a seamstress, and R. Willard Edwards, who worked in the trust department of Howard Savings Institution, one of the largest banks in New Jersey at the time. Young Theresa enjoyed a comfortable childhood within a tight-knit family, but as a student at a recently integrated high school, she experienced racism for the first time.
"Wherever you come across racism, you must speak up and out and stop it in its tracks.” —Theresa Walker
“My few black friends and I noticed that a certain teacher would never give black students an A,” she recalls. “A schoolmate of mine, Lydia, was a white girl from Russia. We were friendly, and we made the same grades on all the tests [in the class]. When the report cards came out, my report card said B, hers said A.” Upset, she talked with her father, who suggested she take it up directly with the teacher. Walker then asked her teacher after class why there was a discrepancy in her grade and that of her white classmate’s.
“She told me, ‘You got a very high B, and Lydia [had] a low A.’ She dismissed it, with the implication that I should be happy with what was given, even though it was not what I had earned. I earned an A.”
When she stepped off the train with her mother in Richmond to start classes at VUU, Walker says that the city’s segregation and racism were immediately apparent. “The first thing we noticed was the ‘colored’ waiting room, and the ‘white only’ waiting room. ... A few days later, I ordered something from a little bakery near the school while I was waiting for my friends, and sat down to eat. My roommate, who was from Danville, came in and said, ‘You can’t sit here, it’s only for white people!’ all in a tizzy. I took the streetcars with my girlfriends to class sometimes, and black people had to sit in the back. It was so strange.”
Walker left Virginia Union after her sophomore year to attend Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. As she finished school and began married life, she supported her husband’s ministries in Virginia as well as his growing duties as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by King and others in 1957.
Wyatt Tee Walker (right) with Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo by Jamie Betts courtesy the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Memorial Library Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Richmond)
By 1960, Wyatt Tee Walker had been appointed executive director of the SCLC and King’s chief of staff. He helped to organize a series of Freedom Rides in 1961, where black and white people would ride buses through the South and along the way attempt to integrate bus terminals, lunch counters and restrooms.
The Freedom Riders placed themselves in incredible danger. On the very first trip, seminary student John Lewis (now a Georgia congressman) was violently attacked; days later, a group of Freedom Riders barely escaped death when a white mob threw a bomb into their bus.
“My husband was working with Dr. King, and came home one evening and said he was going on the next Freedom Ride. I didn’t say anything, but I knew I was going, too,” Theresa Walker says. “My own thoughts were, I felt I had to go. They thought because the bus was burned, people wouldn’t go on the Freedom Rides. My husband and I agreed, we couldn’t let this stop us. That’s why I went, and that’s why I’d go again if I had to.”
After arranging for her parents to keep their four children, she boarded a bus with her husband on May 24, 1961, on a Freedom Ride from Atlanta through Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, destined for Jackson, Mississippi. After days of discomfort — “The bus driver would stop and let the whites use restrooms along the way, but he didn’t stop for the blacks; we had to hold it.” — the Walkers arrived in Jackson, where armed officers greeted them.
“The police were waiting for us,” Walker says. “They put us right in the paddy wagon, and when we got to the jail, my husband and [the other male Freedom Riders] went one way, and me and two white girls went another way.”
Margaret Burr Leonard, then a 19-year-old college student who was on the trip, recalls that when the women were separated, Theresa Walker was placed in a cell by herself at the city jail, next to the one with the white women, for a night before they were transferred to another facility.
“There were rats in her cell,” says Leonard, now a retired journalist living in Tallahassee, Florida. “I don’t know if she ever went to sleep.” She describes Walker, whom she saw most recently at a 2011 reunion, as smart and “very quiet and brave.”
While men got more attention for their roles in the civil rights movement, “in some places, women were important leaders,” Leonard says. In New Orleans, where she attended Newcomb College, women increasingly took control, she adds. “They were very effective and competent.”
Walker recounts abuses large and small as she endured a week of confinement.
“We would hear the men singing in another part of the jail, and we’d start in singing, too. The jailer told us to stop or he’d punish us. We sang anyway, and he turned on the heat that night, hot as it was in there,” she says. “They were so cruel and mean.” Upon her release, when officers returned her possessions, Walker discovered her diamond engagement ring was missing. When she confronted the jailer about it, she remembers him responding, “I’m the only one with a key to get in there where your stuff was kept. You never turned in a diamond ring.”
She left without her jewelry, but with her dignity, and a sense of responsibility that prevailed in her and remains today.
“I can only say, I think wherever you come across racism, you must speak up and out and stop it in its tracks if you can, however you can,” she says. “There’s still much work for all of us to do.”
