Civil Rights Leader Wyatt Tee Walker Dies; Worked With Martin Luther King
Civil rights leaders Joseph Lowery, left, and Wyatt Tee Walker take part in a 2008 event looking at where the nation is since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Walker, who helped assemble King’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” died Tuesday morning in Virginia.
Susan Walsh / Associated Press file
The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who helped assemble the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” from notes the incarcerated King wrote on paper scraps and newspaper margins, has died.
He was either 88 or 89. Family records showed different years of birth, said his daughter, Patrice Walker Powell, who confirmed his death.
Powell said her father died Tuesday morning at an assisted living facility in Chester, Virginia.
Walker was brought in by King to be the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, three years after the civil rights organization was founded.
He already was a top civil rights leader in Virginia, where he had led a “Pilgrimage of Prayer” in Richmond against school segregation on New Year’s Day 1959.
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