Against the Tide
Walker differs not only from most blacks–he’s an unabashed Repub-lican–but from many black conservatives as well. He says he’s never been a liberal. Growing up as the eldest of ten children in Troy, Alabama, he was intimately acquainted with the Jim Crow south of the 1950s. His family emphasized hard work and education: Walker’s great-grandfather founded a school for black children in a local church, his father worked in a sawmill, and his mother was a maid and cook. To earn spending money, Walker picked cotton and pulled peanuts. “There was no welfare,” he recalls. “There were no liberals out there telling us that you cannot learn unless you were in a white school or sitting in school next to whites. What was important was education, period.”
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When Walker was a teenager much of the black community was united around the issue of civil rights. Only a few of his relatives–the landowners in the family–could safely vote in elections. In 1955 Walker helped guard Martin Luther King Jr.’s home during the Montgomery bus boycott. “Kids from everywhere became involved in the boycott–if you had the guts to do it,” he says. Later he recounted his experiences for Bearing the Cross, David Garrow’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning book on King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1970 Walker took a job with Sears, Roebuck & Company, where he stayed for 23 years. Sears transferred him to Chicago in 1979, and the next year he attended a landmark meeting of 100 black academics and businesspeople in San Francisco that proved to be a turning point in his career as an activist. The conference was organized by conservative economist Thomas Sowell, who became a major influence on Walker.
“It was by choice that I invested my own money in the think tank because I knew that I was controversial,” he explains. “Black folks don’t like Clarence Thomas. I was aware of that. I started my organization without any promise of any funds from the federal government or from any corporation or any foundation. I wanted to show the big C on my part–commitment–hoping by showing the big C that there would be folks in the business of giving away money who would recognize ethics and morality where they saw it and would be favorable toward giving money.”
“There are other folks who think as I do who are not as public about it as I am,” he says. “We all fight in our different ways.” o
