Ronald W. Walters: A fighter against global apartheid

Brother Ronald Walters joined the ancestors on 10 September 2010. Over the past 50 years he was a scholar and activist in all areas of the global Pan-African movement. From his early years in Kansas, USA, in the movement against Jim Crow he was involved in demonstrations and sit-ins.

Walters emerged as a major international spokesperson for reparations, peace and social justice. He was at the forefront of the campaigns of the African Liberation Support Committee in the early 1970s and was a participant in the World Conference against Racism in Durban 30 years later. He wrote passionately against apartheid and worked to build a grassroots movement across Africa to oppose global apartheid.

As one of the activists behind the anti-apartheid struggles, he saw first-hand how the system responded to the activities of congressman Charles Diggs, who carried forth the anti-apartheid work from the halls of Congress. Serving as Diggs’ senior advisor, Walters sharpened the international understanding of the Rhodesian and South African apartheid regimes. He was at the base of the mobilisation of blacks to exercise their right to participate in the political system in the United States and wrote extensively on its political processes.

As one of the forces behind the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson campaigns in 1984, and 1988, Walters wanted to carry forward the struggles for full democratic rights. While he is better known for his scholarly writings, for example, ‘Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach’, Walters was committed to the struggles against institutionalised racism and eugenics. He elaborated on this in the book ‘White Nationalism: Black Interests, Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community’. This book can assist us in understanding the rabid racist movement that continues to try and dominate public spaces in the United States.

Walters opposed white supremacy and white nationalism and worked hard to alert students to the realities of the US state system. It was his objective to work for a new society where all humans could live in dignity. His support for the rights of oppressed peoples led him to articulate a brand of Pan-Africanism that supported the rights of oppressed blacks and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world. For instance, he supported the rights of self determination of Palestinians. His scholarship and activism are a beacon for those who want to understand the meaning of commitment. He struggled hard to break the conservative stranglehold on mainstream political scientists.

STRUGGLES IN THE ACADEMY

The biographical notes of Walters’ work tell the story of a scholar who toiled for change even as a teenager. Whether it was his activity as the president of the Youth Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (NAACP) or as a budding scholar, Walters had marked a path for struggle since his undergraduate days at Fisk University. His fruitful years at Fisk led him to work closely with Diggs, another Fisk graduate. His close friend and colleague James Turner underscored the long history of Walter’s involvement in the black liberation struggles. Long before the sit-ins by youths in Greensboro, North Carolina, made national and international news, Walters was organising against racism in the South. Turner, who was full of grief over the loss of his close friend and colleague, also commented on Walters’ humility.

Dr. John Johnson, a colleague of Walters’ when he taught at Syracuse University in 1969, has also spoken of his passion and work among youth on an off campus. Walters was very clear that black students on white campuses had a special responsibility and Johnson recalled Walters’ electric presentation on the question of black awareness in higher education. This was the period of the black uprisings on the Cornell and Syracuse university campuses in upstate New York.

Like Clarke, Walters worked in a tradition that fused African knowledge systems with his formal training in the Western academy. As a communicator, Walters was continuously working, traveling, speaking, advocating, fighting and proposing peace and reparations.

For those who did not know Walters it is now possible to get his view of his growth as a scholar from the Oral History Interview with Ronald W. Walters. Conscious of the role of oratory in preserving the history and culture of Africans, Walters produced an eight-part video of the history of his life.

WALTERS’ BRAND OF PAN-AFRICANISM

Writing in the preface of his book, ‘Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora’, Walters described his early days as a student and activist. His first awareness of Pan-Africanism occurred in 1963 when, as a senior at Fisk University, he wrote an essay titled ‘The Blacks’ which won a Readers Digest national essay competition.

His book details his association with the Pan-African Movement and his work with Jimmy Garret, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Amiri Baraka, Courtland Cox, Howard Fuller (Owusu Sadauki) and William Strickland. Walters also wrote of his activities in the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA). The AHSA was the effort of those who opposed the domination of the African Studies Association (ASA) by those who served the interests of empire. Walters worked with Pan-Africanists such as James Turner, John Henrik Clarke, Ron Karenga, Leonard Jeffries, Molefi Asante and countless others.

Although he was trained in the American university system he broke with the traditions that placed scholarship in the service of oppressors. He was a founding member of the National Black Political Science Association (NBPSA), and was one of the few senior political scientists to challenge head-on the efforts to marginalise Pan-Africanism by the foundations and the gatekeepers in the academy. This was a major battle at a moment when the State Department and the foundations had mobilised to distort the true meaning of Pan-Africanism.

Prior to the Second World War scholars such as C.L.R James, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others linked Pan-Africanism to global anti-racist struggles. This brand of Pan-Africanism was anti-imperialist and anti-fascist. The British tolerated these Pan-Africanists during the struggles against Hitler and Mussolini but worked to undermine and co-opt this Pan-Africanism after the war. British academics entered the discussion on Pan-Africanism seeking to determine the trajectory of research, scholarship and activism on the subject. Some made the distinction between Pan-Africanism with a big ‘P’ and Pan Africanism with a small ‘p’.

Pan-Africanism in the United States was linked directly to the lived experiences of peoples of African descent, so the ruling forces in the USA worked hard to redefine the meaning of Pan-Africanism and inscribe it in the ideological battles of the Cold War. After the Second World War, leading scholars of political science such as Joseph Nye and David Apter were involved in research and writing on Pan-Africanism. Melville Herskovits established a tradition among liberals that Africans could not be serious scholars on Africa and Pan-Africanism because of their emotional attachment to Africa. Herskovits dismissed Du Bois as a propagandist and political activist, rather than a serious scholar. This ensured that liberal whites dominated the research and teaching spaces in the country’s leading universities.

Walters was entering the field of political science a generation after Du Bois when the ‘philanthropists’ and government institutions were bent on funding scholarship that would perpetuate white hegemony in the white academy. Pan-Africanism had to seek refuge in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities in order to survive the ideological onslaught of the oppressors.

Apter was writing on Ghana, Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism, while building an organisation called the American Society of African Culture. It later turned out that this organisation was heavily funded by the intelligence agencies and the foundations. Walters belonged to that group of scholars, black and white, who were opposed to the mobilisation of the social sciences for military purposes. Research by thinkers for the empire was bent on distorting the history of Pan-Africanism. Under the direction of political scientists such as Apter and John Marcum a major study, ‘Pan Africanism Reconsidered’ was published. Nye had written on Pan-Africanism and integration in East Africa at a moment when the Nkrumah project of African unity was still on the international agenda.

Walters opposed the links between the intelligence agencies and the professors of the American Political Science Association. There was a major rupture within the ASA at a meeting in Montreal in 1969. It was at this point that the AHSA was formed to bring Pan-Africanism back to its base – among those who opposed racism, colonialism and apartheid. It was in this same period in 1969 when Walters joined those black political scientists who formed the NBPSA.

After the rupture in 1969, the subject of Pan-Africanism was dropped by mainstream political scientists (although Andrew Apter followed in the footsteps of his father David when he wrote the book ‘The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria’). The study of Pan-Africanism fell under the rubric of Black Studies and mainstream political scientists relegated this subject to the backburner. In this period it was unfashionable to write and speak about the global Pan-African struggles. But Walters refused to go along with this and carried his passion for justice to the centres of intellectual debate.

Research funds from the major foundations dried up. Funding from the Department of Education disappeared. There were few centres where graduate students could do doctoral research in this field. Walters directed one such centre when he served as a professor of political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. From this base he trained a new generation of thinkers and activists to link the local to the global.

PAN AFRICANISM AND THE AFRICAN LIBERATION SUPPORT COMMITTEE (ALSC)

As a committed intellectual, Walters did not confine his work to the Howard University campus. He was one of the key thinkers behind the Congressional Black Caucus. He served as an advisor for Congressman Charles Diggs who waged a relentless battle against American support for the illegal government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. It was while working with Diggs, Shirley Chisholm, Charles Rangel, Louis Stokes and others that the Pan-African struggles to boycott chrome from Rhodesia took the spotlight in the USA.

Walters also wrote on the apartheid bomb. His book ‘South Africa and the Bomb: Responsibility and Deterrence’ became a reference for the anti-apartheid campaign and he wrote scholarly articles and op-ed pieces about US government’s support of the oppression of blacks in Africa.

(Today, the US government is working hard to sow confusion about humanitarianism and the so-called War on Terror in Africa to disguise new efforts to militarise the continent. It has established the US Africa Command, headed by a black general who struts around Africa under the guise of supporting peace and good governance.)

Of the more than 100 scholarly articles Walters published, his most fruitful period of publication was those years when he was fighting apartheid in the USA and in Africa. At that moment, he was organically linked to the black liberation movement.

This academic work was done alongside Walters’ activism in the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) The ALSC represented one of the highest points of the organising for Pan-African liberation in the second part of the 20th century. The energy and spirit of the people were manifest in demonstrations, protests, books, films, and other forms of political statements on the struggles in Africa and the struggles of Africans in the Diaspora. Walters was one of those caught in this ferment with the ideological explosions from such a dynamic moment. Many ‘scholars’ did not survive to continue in the movement for liberation. Divisions over ideological lines blurred deeper divisions among those who worked for the long term needs of liberation. Walters used all the resources available to support the ALSC and was in the midst of these deliberations.

The full history of the ALSC is still to be uncovered and Walters himself provided his own insight into this period in his book ‘Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora’. This was a period when black political representatives, such as Diggs, were challenged to link the opposition to apartheid in South Africa to the apartheid conditions inside the United States. At this time, those from black political spaces dominated the news on the opposition to apartheid and colonialism. Diggs had used his position in Congress to work with the ALSC and the forces of freedom to expose US corporations that were profiting from the exploitation of black labour. So incensed were the ruling forces in the USA that they worked hard to silence Diggs and removed him from Congress.

Removing Diggs was an effort to silence the anti-apartheid forces from the centre of national organising. The system sought to humiliate not only Diggs but the entire black liberation forces in order to prop up white supremacy at home and abroad.

Throughout the 1970s Walters worked tirelessly on the political situation in Rhodesia and was one of the founders of the TransAfrica Forum. The ruling class in the USA was threatened by this activism and worked to discredit and frustrate those involved in these formations. It was in this climate that Diggs was charged with taking kickbacks in 1978.

Walters understood all of this and worked even harder to find spaces to oppose racism. In the 1980s he was a close advisor to the Jesse Jackson Campaign.

WORKING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE POLITICAL SYSTEM TO COMBAT RACISM

While immersed in electoral politics, Walters was writing about the limitations of the same electoral process, based on the experience of blacks. He spelled out the need for multiple forms of struggle in the book ‘Freedom is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates and American Presidential Politics’. After his involvement in the established political system, Walters was writing for the younger generation to show them that the democratic facade of elections concealed greater challenges for society.

I remember in 2007 when he came up to Syracuse to speak on the Obama phenomenon, we spent hours reflecting on the need for a movement that would be clear about the need to work inside and outside the system. Walters wrote weekly columns on the need for multiple forms of struggle. He prepared us to develop the needed strategies to combat the neo-fascist forces that are now mobilising under the banner of the Tea Party. From his scholarship we understand that the Tea Party Nation is only one manifestation of the deep racism of this society. His book ‘White Nationalism and Black Interests’ outlined the institutionalised forms of racism and the dangers for black and brown peoples. It is now urgent for engaged scholar/activists to grasp the dangers of the Tea Party’s form of populism in a period of extended capitalist depression. It was for this reason that while he was on his deathbed, Walters found his voice to speak out forcefully against conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s work to manipulate the memory and meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

THE REPARATIONS MOVEMENT

Walters worked hard for the rights of the peoples of Haiti, the peoples of Brazil and for oppressed peoples all over the world. In the second half of the 20th century he worked to show that there should be no distinction between theory and practice. He served with those who campaigned for reparative justice in the United States and castigated those congressional members from the black community who retreated from the demands of the UN World Conference Against Racism. When the follow-up conference was convened in Durban in April 2009, he was again advocating and popularising its program of action.

When there were sections of the black middle class working to domesticate black politics in the service of the Democratic Party and in the service of empire, Walters worked even harder to fight for peace and justice internationally.

WALTERS’ MADE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

I alerted him when I started writing my book ‘Barack Obama and Twenty-First Century Politics’. He supported and encouraged me and was always full of optimism borne out of concrete experience in the struggle. I asked him to write a blurb for the book and he readily accepted sending back the words of solidarity that now grace the book. I did not to know then that he was terminally ill because he did not share his pain with us. He worked up to the last moments of his life. Ronald Walters wanted to repair the destruction of human lives. He wanted society to understand the crimes of slavery and racism. The world is a better place because he was with us.

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* Horace Campbell is the author of Barack Obama and Twenty First century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA.
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