Wyatt Tee Walker

‘‘One of the keenest minds of the nonviolent revolution.’’ ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil rights leader, pastor and musicologist Wyatt Tee Walker was born August 16, 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts and attended Virginia Union University, earning  a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics and a master's in divinity. It was at this time he met Martin Luther King, Jr. at an inter-seminary meeting while King was at Crozier Theological Seminary.

Upon graduation in 1953, Walker became pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. He became involved in local civil rights issues, serving as president of the Petersburg NAACP chapter and as founder and president of the Virginia branch of the Congress of Racial Equality. He organized the Petersburg Improvement Association, modeled after the Montgomery Improvement Association, a grassroots organization fighting segregation. Walker was jailed in 1958 the first of seventeen times for leading efforts to integrate the Petersburg Public Library, deliberately choosing to try to check out a biography of Robert E. Lee.

Police dogs attack Walter Gadsden in Birmingham

Walker was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Convention in 1957, and in 1960 King asked him to come to Atlanta to serve as its executive director. He proved to be an excellent administrator, coordinating staff, raising money, and raising the new organization to national prominence alongside the older NAACP and CORE.

He was the primary strategist for "Project C", the implementation of the Birmingham Campaign in 1963 that called for marches, sit-ins and boycotts of local businesses, with an eye for detail that included counting the number of stools at each lunch counter. The violent reaction of Commission of Public Safety Bull Connor, using dogs and fire hoses to subdue the protesters, brought national attention to the SCLC's efforts as did King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Taylor left the SCLC to for the Negro Heritage Library, working with school boards to expand public school curricula and library resources to reflect African American history and culture. In 1967 he was called to serve as senior pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. King conducted his official installation and preached that Sunday's sermon on March 24, 1968, eleven days before he was assassinated.

Taylor returned to school to earn a doctorate in 1975 from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, specializing in African American sacred music. He published Somebody's Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, the first of his eleven books, in 1979. He has served as an urban affairs consultant to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and on the American Committee on Africa, an anti-apartheid group.

Taylor retired in 2004 and now lives in Virginia. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Willa Player

"We don't teach our students what to think. We teach them how to think. If I have to give exams in jail, that's what I'll do." ~ Willa Player

Willa Beatrice Player was born August 9, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi and moved to Akron Ohio as a child. Few college opportunities were available for African American women at the time but with contacts made through the Methodist church her family was active in, she was able to attend Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. She graduated in 1929 and earned an MA from Oberlin College the next year. She was immediately hired to teach Latin and French at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a women's school also affiliated with the Methodist Church. She did post-graduate work at the University of Grenoble, France under a Fulbright Scholarship, and received her EdD from Columbia University in 1948.

Dr. Player quickly rose in the administration of Bennett, serving as Director of Religious Activities, Director of Admissions, Coordinator of Instruction, Vice President, and in 1956 was named President, becoming the first woman to serve as President of any four-year accredited college in the country. When no other institution in Greensboro was willing to host a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. for fear of retaliation by segregationists, she offered the Bennett facilities, saying, "Bennett College is a liberal arts school where freedom rings." She describes this, as well as a campus visit by Eleanor Roosevelt, in an interview by the Civil Rights Greensboro Oral History Project.

Undated Photograph from
DuBois Archives, UMass Amherst

King's speech may have planted the seed for the sit-ins that followed in February 1960 as North Carolina A&T students protested segregation at Woolworth's lunch counters. Bennett students, faculty and staff joined the protests; at one time about 40% of the Bennett student body was under arrest. While Dr. Player did not encourage students to protest, she supported those who did and were jailed, visiting daily and arranging for professors to hold class for them and give exams.

Dr. Player left Bennett College in 1966 to become Director of Development of College Support for the US Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare where she initiated the Strengthening Developing Institutions program to gain financial support for minority schools. After her retirement in 1986 she returned to Akron where she served on many church and educational boards, and was named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame.

Dr. Player never married, saying, "I didn't have time for men. I was too busy educating the youth." She died on August 27, 2003 at the age of 94.

Benjamin E. Mays

Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done. ~Benjamin E. Mays

Benjamin Elijah Mays, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called his "spiritual mentor", was born August 1, 1894 in Greenwood County, South Carolina. After graduating as high school valedictorian, he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine where he graduated with honors as a class leader in 1920. He explained his choice of a primarily white, New England college in his 1971 autobiography Born to Rebel, saying "How could I know I was not inferior to the white man, having never had a chance to compete with him?"


Mays then taught at psychology, debate and religion at Morehouse College in Atlanta and pastored Shiloh Avenue Baptist Church before attending the University of Chicago where he earned an MA (1925) and PhD from the School of Religion (1935). With Joseph Nicholson he co-authored The Negro's Church in 1933, a study funded by the Institute of Social and Religious Research.

With Bates College Debate Team, 1920

Mays served as Dean of the Howard University School of Religion from 1934 to 1940. During this time he traveled to India, meeting Mohandas Gandhi and was greatly influenced by Gandhi's view on non-violent resistance. He then became president of Morehouse College, a position he held until 1967.

While at Morehouse he excelled at fundraising and other administrative duties, keeping enrollment steady during World War II. He avidly supported students participating in sit-ins during the 1960's, one of a minority of college presidents nationwide to do so. In addition to Dr. King, other alumni he influenced were theologian Howard Thurman, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond. After retirement he served on the Atlanta Board of Education from 1970 to 1981, becoming its first African American president.

Mays died in Atlanta on March 28, 1984 at the age of 89. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. His philosophy of education is reflected in these quotes from Born to Rebel:

"The tragedy doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It isn't a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for."

"To me black power must mean hard work, trained minds, and perfected skills to perform in a competitive society.The injustices imposed upon the black man for centuries make it all the more obligatory that he develop himself…. There must be no dichotomy between the development of one's mind and a deep sense of appreciation of one's heritage. An unjust penalty has been imposed upon the Negro because he is black. The dice are loaded against him. Knowing this, as the Jew knows about anti-Semitism, the black man must never forget the necessity that he perfect his talents and potentials to the ultimate."