Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr., a lifelong
fighter for justice, died in his sleep on September 7, 2010 at the age of 80.
The cause of death was a heart attack. His funeral on Sept. 17 was attended by hundreds at Convent Baptist Church in Harlem.
 Rev. Lucius Walker Jr. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
Until the very end, Rev. Walker was
vigorously involved in the struggle as director of the Inter-religious Foundation
for Community Organization and Pastors for Peace. In July, he led the 21st U.S.-Cuba
Friendshipment Caravan, an IFCO project challenging the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
His
determined effort to end the blockade made Walker a highly respected and
admired figure in Cuba. In an article announcing his death, Cuba’s Granma
newspaper said Cubans “don’t want to even think of a world without Lucius
Walker.”
Ricardo Alarcón,
President of Cuba’s National Assembly, said:
“We Cubans are eternally grateful to Lucius Walker, to IFCO and to
Pastors for Peace for their constant struggle against the cruel blockade
against our people, and for the liberation of our five compatriots [the Cuban
Five] who have been unjustly imprisoned for 12 years for having tried to avoid
terrorist actions. … Lucius will always be with us, he will be reborn in the
struggle until victory.”
Pastors for Peace was
founded in 1988, following an attack by U.S.-armed counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua on
an unarmed fact-finding delegation. Two people were killed in the assault and
49 were wounded, including Walker. The group organized several caravans from
the U.S. bringing aid to Central America.
The first caravan to Cuba
took place in October 1992, at an extremely difficult moment in the history of
the Revolution. The recent counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and the eastern
European countries had deprived Cuba of 85 percent of its foreign trade and
caused an economic contraction of 35 percent, a more severe downturn than
during the worst period of the 1930s Great Depression in the United States.
The U.S. was conducting
menacing large-scale military maneuvers in the Caribbean with Cuba as the
obvious target. As the November election neared, Republican President George Bush
Sr. and his Democratic challenger Bill Clinton united in support of the
Torricelli bill designed to tighten the U.S. blockade and intensify the
suffering of the Cuban people.
After making stops in
cities across the country, the first Caravan was at first halted by the Border
Patrol as it attempted to cross into Mexico at Laredo, Texas, but due to the
determination of the “caravanistas” it eventually made it through. As was to be
repeated 20 more times in the future, the group’s medical and other
humanitarian aid was then driven to the port of Tampico, Mexico, and loaded on
a freighter on its way to Havana.
The halting of part of
the second caravan in July 1993 led to a 23-day hunger strike in Laredo, where
the temperatures reached at least 107 degrees Fahrenheit every day. The hunger
strike led by Walker, combined with support activities around the country, significantly
raised awareness of the blockade and its impact on the Cuban people.
After enduring more than
three weeks without food in an asphalt Customs lot, the hunger strikers achieved
victory. All the supplies, including the iconic yellow school bus in which the
hunger strikers lived through their ordeal, went on to Cuba.
In 1998, Walker joined
the Iraq Sanctions Challenge, traveling to Iraq with Ramsey Clark and many
others to deliver millions of dollars of medical aid in defiance of the U.S.
government’s blockade of that country.
In September 2001,
Pastors for Peace was one of the first organizations to join the steering
committee of the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition
which held the first demonstrations opposing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and
Washington.
A leader of the Black liberation movement
While Lucius Walker has been best-known
in recent years in relation to the Cuba caravans, he was also an important
leader in the Black liberation struggle. He rose to prominence in the movement as
the director of the Northcott Neighborhood House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from
1963 to 1967.
In 1967, he became the founding
director of IFCO, which pressured the religious establishment—Catholic,
Protestant and Jewish—to live up to their teachings regarding help for the poor
and oppressed. A major part of IFCO’s mission was securing resources for
organizations in the African American, Latino, Native American and other
communities.
Dr. Gwendolyn Patton, an activist in
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, described Walker as an “abiding
friend of SNCC during our transition/transformation from simplistic social
integration and dismantling of Jim Crow laws to a fundamental strategy to
achieve cultural, political and economic collective inclusion in a society that
purported to be pluralist and democratic.”
In 1969, Walker told the New York
Times, “It’s a travesty how much churches have said about social justice and
how little they have done.”
In 1973, at a time of strong progressive
movements in many of the mainline churches, he was named Associate General Secretary
of the National Council of Churches, a position he held for five years until
being fired by the NCC’s General Secretary. His firing was met with angry
protests from inside and outside religious organizations. Following his ouster,
he returned to lead IFCO.
Walker was one of the founders of
the National Black United Fund in 1972 and the National Anti-Klan Network in
the early 1980s.
He is survived by his daughter Gail,
also a well-known activist, and by two other daughters, Donna and Edith; two
sons, Lucius III and Richard; a brother, William; a sister, Lottie Bethea; and
three grandchildren.
The writer has participated in the U.S.–Cuba Friendshipment
Caravan project since its founding in 1992.
