When you think about Dr. king
what do you most think about?
Well, first of all
l think about what a great
sacrifice he made not only in life but
the execution and assassination and how it
damaged what were doing. And I think
if he lived, you need will be so much further
ahead than we are now. It was a terrible
blow to us and it's hardly a day goes by
that I wouldn't figure some, I have some
remembrance of him and how he did and what he
thought about.
And when you were in the,
in the heart of the Civil Rights
Movement was it a happy time, a scary time?
I mean, how did it feel as someone in it?
Well, I think a mixture
of both.
There were a lot of scary times, when we
didn't think we'd get out alive, and yet
we had a kind of a joy and struggle
and one of the things that I remember most
about Dr. King is his a great sense of
humor, and how he loved funny stories. And
that was a part of  the joy we had, in,
in the struggle.
Was there one joke or story
you most remember that he told, or most liked?
Well, one that I remember most is one that his
mother told. I had been sent to Nashville,
Tennessee to prepare for the annual
meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, and Dr. King had to said to me
He said I know we've got to have large
churches for the night rallies but ...
I want you to find some way to involve the
small churches. So I went up to Nashville
and began to put things together,
and I worked it out so that the
smaller churches would be the registration
headquarters. And so I called Dr. King
and told him that that was the plan and
he agreed and when he and Abernathy
came up the day before they're going
[indecipherable] he wanted to see to say of the
registration and it was a little Zion
AME Church. So he and Dr. Abernathy
rented a car and drove into Nashville
into the African American community,
looking for this church. And they,
they were going slowly looking for
somebody to ask and they saw a fellow on the
sidewalk with a bill cap turned sideways
they said, "Let's ask him." So they stopped
and fellow looked into the car and he recognized
Dr. King, he said, "Martin Luther King."
He said, "[indecipherable]
What you want Dr King?" And
Dr. King told him he want to find a little
Zion AME church.
He said, "I tell you what you do Dr. King,
stay right on this street until you come to the junior
high school and you make a left.
No, turn at the next two blocks and go
down to the lumberyard and then hang a
left, and you can't - and then he began to
act confused, he said, "Dr. King I don't believe I
know where that church is." And so they
thanked him and they pulled off slowly
looking for somebody else to ask and
Dr. King was sitting in the passenger seat
and he saw the fellow running behind the car
he said "Pull over Ralph." He said, "The fellow we asked
asked about the church, he's running up to the
car and they pull over and the fellow came up to the...
to the car. He was all out of breath.
He said, "Dr. King,
Dr. King, said, right after you left, said, my
brother-in-law came up and he told me to
tell you that he didn't know neither.
It's one of my favorite stories
What do you think was... What in your
memory what were the most key moments
of the Civil Rights...
Well I think Birmingham was the primary
watershed of the nonviolent movement.
And before we went over there to start
that campaign, Dr. King had said to us
"If we crack Birmingham, we can crack
the South." And it turned out to be just
like he said. And we made a lot of
sacrifices in Birmingham, we sent a lot
of people to jail and we castrated
Bull Connor and who was a so-called public
safety commissioner and our chief adversary.
But we tricked him into using the dogs
and the water hoses, and that's what
swayed the public opinion of America,
that things needed to be changed in Birmingham, Alabama,
and led to the Public Accommodations Act
of 1964. So I think that was the
defining moment of the Civil Rights
Movement. Selma was just as important
because of the right to vote but
Birmingham was more dramatic I think in
its impact on America.
Did it feel in
the middle of that campaign that you
weren't going to win, did it, or did you..
We never thought about anything but
winning. We knew we could, if we go to jail,
Bull Connor would tip his hand. America
would be touched to see what we were
really trying to do with our Civil
Rights Movement. And talk about the
letter from Birmingham jail, because I read
that as a philosophy student at
University of Michigan years later.
Talk about your roll in that.
Well, I was the only one in Birmingham
at that time who could read Dr. King's
chicken scratch writing, and it was smuggled out
in edges of newspaper and toilet paper and
any kind of paper he could get. And,
my secretary, a lady named Miss Willie Pearl
Mackey, we stayed up all night and I was
translating it to her. She said, about him, she said,
"He sure can speak, but he can't write."
His writing was sort of illegible. But I had
gotten used to it and I knew what his
writing was like and so that was the
roll I played. I think the most important
thing that I had to do with it was
convincing the Quakers. They wanted to call it tears...
tears of love. And I don't know,
you need to call it what it is, a letter
from Birmingham jail. So I gave it its
name and it became I think one of the most
important document of the century's.
What was the lowest point of the Civil
Rights Movement that you remember and the
highest point? I think the lowest point
was the impasse that was created in
Albany, Georgia. And that's because of
squabbling between the lead organization,
the NAACP, SNCC and CLC, and we spent too much
energy trying to push our organizations,
instead of working on the adversary.
And that was a low point for us,
because it was.. media treated it as a defeat
for Dr. King, but Dr. King didn't
fail, Albany failed. We changed it, but
ended up in a Mexican standoff.
And what was the highest point would you say?
I would again
say Birmingham. And what brought... did
you know as a teenager that you would
get in the Civil Rights Movement one day
or you just kind of... I know you were a
minister in Virginia, but what got you
into depths, and dedicated to it? Well, my first
foray was when I was nine years old. Two
sisters and I went to the theater in our
town, in New Jersey, south Jersey. It was very
segregated. In fact, the part of New Jersey
we lived in was below the Mason-Dixon
line. And, New Jersey passed a law that
if you refuse entrance to a place for
whatever reason, you could go in without a ticket.
And they wouldn't sell us a ticket at the
Park Theater in our little town and we just went in.
And the picture was "The Great Lie". And
the wouldn't let anybody sit in the seats in the
row that we sat in. So that was my initial,
going in. I didn't, at that time, think
about the future. But when I got to
college, and rode in the segregated trolley
cars, and saw the signs that said "Colored
Only",  I could see the ministry was
the best way to go and that's what
made me decide to go into the ministry.
So you went into the ministry in part, for the civil-rights aspect of
the ministry?
You saw the ministry is a way to get
involved in civil rights versus purely
for religious reasons?... To work against
to work for justice, I saw that,
because the minister was not prone to the
pressures that the community would put on him,
because he was employed and
accountable to the black community.
And then, there's a famous story about you
getting a library book when you're back in Virginia
Could you tell that story?
Going protest against the public library in
Petersburg, it was first time a library
had been approached. So when I went in
the white door, I decided I wanted a volume
one of Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Robert E. Lee
I was kind of rubbing it in
their face. And, because I went in and
was in the so-called "White Section",  I was
ultimately arrested, with other
people. I think fourteen of us went to
jail and ministers and two or three students, we
stayed in jail for a couple days, and it
sort of gave enthusiasm and momentum to the movement,
which emanated from Petersburg. Petersburg
was the center of civil rights activity
in Virginia. It created
interest in other cities. Lynchburg
and Roanoke, and Northfolk and Portsmouth
because of what we done be in Petersburg
And, how did you go from your work in
Petersburg and Virginia to teaming up with Dr.
King? Well, it was my work in Petersburg
that impressed Dr. King and he felt that I
was the person to duplicate it across the South. And it was from Petersburg
that he recruited me to become the first full-time executive
director of SCLC. And about how old
were you around that time, and how old was
he around that time roughly?
I think I was 32.
And he was in his early 30's as well right?
He was about... I found out in
a recent year that I happened to be a
year older than he, because I thought I was
32, I was really 33.
But both very young to be leading a big movement.
Young and in the ministry and seminary-trained
and kind of bright and fearless.
And of course, he was characterized by his
devotion to nonviolence, which he
learned from Mordecai Johnson and about
Gandhi, and struggle in India. And
despite the detractors who said it wasn't
applicable to the US it turned out to be
our silver bullet. And when you joined
him did you share the nonviolence philosophy,
or did you kind of...
I didn't at first, I knew about it, but I
did... I wasn't committed to it. When I came to
Petersburg, I used to carry a gun,
waiting for someone to cross me on the
race issue, and I planned to shoot them. But
Dr. King made me put my gun down. And then
where were you for the March in
Washington, for the "I Have a Dream"
speech, where were you at that time? Well I was one of
who organizers of that and the great mistake
that I made is that I tried to persuade
Dr. King not to use the "I Have a
Dream" section, because I heard it so much,
and we used it domestically.
And I was thinking about the U.S.,  I wasn't
thinking about in the world stage. But
his wisdom was always deeper than mine.
You were also, for the Nobel Prize in Oslo.
you were with him. I was
the press officer for that trip. And
they asked me to go along and handle the press
responsibilities, which I gladly did. And
it was such a great experience to be
present when he received the Nobel Peace
Prize. And both during those days both
you and he had young wives, young children.
Why don't you talk about Mrs.
Walker's role, and your children. Well, my wife
always made a great sacrifice in support
of our activities in the movement and
how she made that, how she made things
go and keep the children together and
support me,
I don't know. There's really something special about her.
