Excerpt from John Walker: A Man for the 21st Century
by Robert Harrison

In 1952, when John Walker wanted to have lunch out with his friends, he had few choices. As the first African-American to attend Virginia Seminary, he was forbidden from eating with white classmates in most of the state's restaurants. Across the Potomac , though, they could climb up the hill on Wisconsin Avenue in the District of Columbia to break bread. They found a place, in the shadow of a huge half-built Church, where everyone was welcome. Thirty years later, John Walker still welcomed friends to eat with him in that restaurant. But he could look down on it and the city around it from the highest spot in the nation's Capital-the finished tower of a great gothic Church that he would administer as Bishop.

John Walker's journey to the top would take him from a small town in Georgia , through inner-city Detroit , to an exclusive New England prep school. He would walk hand-in-hand with children from poor villages in Costa Rica and Uganda , and he would sit down in serious conversation, with the late twentieth century's most powerful men. He would guide the Episcopal Church through a decade that saw historic reform in its worship; he would ordain among its first women priests. He would preside over the dedication of the sixth-largest Cathedral in the world, whose multi-million dollar construction deficit his fundraising campaign had decisively erased. He would be considered for his Church's highest office. He would be a pastor and spiritual friend to thousands, each of whom felt wholly understood and uniquely cared for when he stopped to talk.

Born the great-grandson of slaves, driven by his father's pride from the unrepentantly unreconstructed South of the 1920s, drawn with his family to the industrial heart of the Midwest in the Great Migration; a child of the Great Depression, a laborer supplying the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II; a witness of the Detroit race riots of 1943; disillusioned college student, recipient of the "white man's largesse"; angry worker for civil rights in Mississippi, friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.; John Walker stood with the police to calm violent young men in the streets of Washington in 1968; he sat in council with President Jimmy Carter to decide the future of the Panama Canal; he watched as Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat received back from Israel the Sinai Desert mountain where, tradition has it, Moses received the Word of God. In decades to come he would lift his voice as an advocate for the powerless in an era of imperial excess and runaway military spending; he would witness and, with his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu, help to bring about the demise of apartheid in South Africa; he would smash the barriers that separated one-half of the human race from full participation in the ordained ministry of the Church, co-consecrating Barbara Harris as the first woman bishop in the Apostolic Succession-the unbroken line of faith and authority that extends two millennia to encompass the most intimate followers of Jesus.

This dynamic journey of faithful reflection ended abruptly in 1989 when Bishop Walker died suddenly in office. Five thousand people mourned him in the Cathedral he saw finished, celebrating his legacy: concern for social justice, for the life of America 's great cities, and for the future of Africa . He had taught and organized the education of the world's elite and the nation's most easily forgotten children. He had brought races, faiths, and nations together in common cause.

Walker was in the forefront of efforts to include women, ethnic minorities, and people of all sexual orientations fully within the life and ministry of the Church. In doing so, he drew deeply on his own experience as a civil rights pioneer. He personally desegregated a seminary, a prep school, and a fashionably private downtown business club. His Cleveland Park home was the first (and for many years, the only) African-American household that his black friends could visit in the white neighborhoods that populated the western side of Rock Creek in Washington , D.C.

John Walker took to heart his parents' foundational belief that education was the door to opportunity. The door nearly closed for little young Johnny Walker who had the audacity to learn to read before he arrived in Mrs. Knotson's kindergarten class. When school began, he read a page aloud instead of coloring it as he had been told. The black child was locked in the closet for the rest of day. He was released only after his mother went to the school to find out why he had not come home with the other white children of their neighbors. Remembering the story without acrimony, Walker used it to help explain why he worked unceasingly, if quietly, to see that the next generation of gifted African-American students would find the doors of every educational institution in America open to them.

From his roots in Depression-era Georgia to his championing of social responsibility before the U.S. Congress, John Walker moved steadily toward ever more aggressive advocacy for the poor. He confronted head-on the "Reagan revolution," giving voice to those left behind in an increasingly economically divided America . The idea that in this country-or any other, for that matter-a child could be hungry was, in Bishop Walker's words, "simply unacceptable." The point, he said, was not only to bless the poor, but to feed them.

As dedicated as he was to what, in an earlier age, would have been called domestic missions, Walker was committed to service abroad as well. The people of Africa weighed heavily on his heart from the time he set foot in Uganda as a young priest assigned to teach in that needy diocese's theological school. Much later, he would train African "baby" Bishops who faced the daunting task of caring for a continent being torn about by its encounter with the modem world. Walker served from the early 1970s until his death as Chairman of the Board of Africare, a leader among private, charitable U.S. organizations assisting Africa .

Walker always understood intuitively the relationship between relief and politics. His ministry brought him into frequent contact with what St. Paul called the "powers of this age." He was intimately involved with complex negotiations and legislation involving Central American and African affairs. In the years when Oliver North and Nelson Mandela lived in the headlines, John Walker made it the Church's business to understand and to speak about Central American freedom fighters and South African opponents of apartheid.

There are those who found the bishop's meddling in secular affairs unseemly. Many, especially older and more socially conservative Episcopalians, thought religion should not interfere with politics. Of course, John Walker knew that the action (or inaction) that flows from religious convictions was inherently political. He was an observant student of history who knew that politics-especially American politics-could be unabashedly religious. His own cathedral existed as testimony to this intermingling as he masterfully balanced the distinct halves of the Cathedral's mission. Guided by his own convictions, Walker saw that televangelism and partisan agendas were not going to be confused with the proclamation of the Gospel.

Home

Episcopal Church House, Mount St. Alban, Washington D.C. 20016-5094
tel: 202/537-6555 • toll-free: 800/642-4427 • fax: 202/364-6605