Lucius Walker (b. August 3, 1930, Roselle, New Jersey – d. September 7, 2010, Demarest, New Jersey) was an American Baptist minister who served as executive director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization in the 1960s and was a persistent advocate for ending the United States embargo against Cuba. He made multiple trips to Cuba with supplies provided in violation of the embargo.
Lucius Walker, Baptist Pastor for Peace, Dies at 80
The Rev. Lucius Walker, a Baptist minister who gained national attention with calls for reparations for the descendants of slaves and with repeated violations of the United States embargo of Cuba through caravans of humanitarian aid, died on Tuesday at his home in Demarest, N.J. He was 80.
The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Gail Walker said.
Mr. Walker’s life was transformed on Aug. 2, 1988, as he led a delegation on a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua, where rebels were battling the American-backed government. Their riverboat was attacked by government soldiers, and Mr. Walker was one of 29 wounded. Two were killed.
Mr. Walker’s first thought, he said, was that he was hit by a bullet paid for by his own country. He called his second thought a prophetic vision: he would form an organization of pastors to fight, or at least clean up after, what he called American imperialism.
That organization, Pastors for Peace, has now sent hundreds of tons of aid, including medical gear and roofing material, to Latin American countries. Of its 40 missions so far, 21 have been to Cuba, which under a 1963 law is off-limits to American trade.
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“The Bible says feed the hungry, clothe the poor,” Mr. Walker said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1996. “It doesn’t say to starve the Communists.”
Mr. Walker helped form a national committee in 2000 to work to return the 6-year-old Elián González to his father in Cuba in the face of strong opposition from the child’s Miami-based relatives as well as Cuban-American and conservative groups. (The child was returned to Cuba.) He also arranged meetings for Fidel Castro when Mr. Castro visited New York, as well as trips to Cuba for politicians and religious leaders.
In 1999, he led the first American delegation to Peru to meet with Lori Berenson, an American who had been convicted of treason there in 1996 for planning terrorist acts.
Mr. Walker relished confrontation. In 1993, The Dallas Morning News quoted a customs official as offering to handle all the paperwork for Mr. Walker to obtain a license for a shipment of humanitarian aid to Cuba. But rather than allow the operation to be legal, Mr. Walker refused the license in favor of disobeying a law that he saw as unjust. He led a 23-day hunger strike instead, and in the end the shipment went through, just as the other 20 caravans to Cuba did — through Mexico or Canada after a tour of American cities to rally support.
Ross Douthat, writing in National Review in 2001, dismissed Mr. Walker and his organization as “a well-established cog in the left-of-left political machine.” (Mr. Douthat is now a columnist for The New York Times.)
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Mr. Walker had perhaps even more influence in the 1960s, when he was executive director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. Its purpose was to link mainstream Protestant, Catholic and Jewish denominations and congregations to community organizers in troubled areas.
“It’s a travesty how much churches have said about social justice and how little they have done,” Mr. Walker told The Times in 1969.
He pushed the organization to support forcing religious groups to pay at least $500 million to blacks as reparations for their ancestors’ enslavement — a position that caused the American Jewish Committee to leave the foundation.
Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, who had been the foundation’s president, cited “the incapacity of the foundation to take a clear-cut position on the revolutionary ideology and racist rhetoric” of the document demanding reparations.
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Lucius Walker was born on Aug. 3, 1930, in Roselle, N.J., to a mason and a homemaker who had 10 children. As a teenager, he won recognition as an accomplished preacher at Pentecostal revival meetings. After graduating from Shaw University, a historically black institution in Raleigh, N.C., where he majored in English, he decided to pursue his “love affair with the teachings of Jesus” and earned a divinity degree from Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts. He earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin and was ordained in 1958.
In 1973, Mr. Walker became associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches but was later fired for giving too much money to community organizers, the council said. In 1978 Mr. Walker returned to the interreligious foundation. Six years later he founded the Salvation Baptist Church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.
Mr. Walker’s activities included forming an umbrella group of civil rights organizations to fight the Ku Klux Klan and another to help prisoners who had been accused of political crimes to obtain bail bonds.
Mr. Walker’s wife, the former Mary Johnson, died in 2008. In addition to his daughter Gail, he is survived by two other daughters, Donna and Edith; two sons, Lucius III and Richard; a brother, William; a sister, Lottie Bethea; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Walker last visited Cuba in July, when, as he had done on many occasions, he met with Mr. Castro. In announcing his death, Granma, the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba, said Cubans “don’t want to even think of a world without Lucius Walker.”
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