Wyatt Tee Walker

He was an actor, known for Malcolm X (1992), 4 Little Girls (1997) and Committee on UnAmerican Activities (1962). He was married to Theresa Ann Edwards.

In 1967, he and King participated in a demonstration in Birmingham, where they were both arrested and jailed for five days. Walker sneaked a small camera into jail, taped to his leg. He took a photo of King, deep in thought while looking through the bars of their cell; it became one of the most famous images of the civil rights leader.

In 1964, he moved to New York, where he ran a publishing business specializing in books for African Americans, and became an assistant pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 1967, he became pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which became his church home until his retirement in 2004. He was also an authority on black church music and wrote several books on the subject.

He was a minister and civil rights leader who was a top assistant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He helped organize the Freedom Rides, an effort to end segregation on interstate bus travel in the Deep South. In 1961, during one of the first trips of the Freedom Riders, he and his wife were among dozens of participants jailed in Jackson, Mississippi. He was a leading planner of the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

He walked into a Virginia public library in 1960 and asked for a biography of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. He believed that Lee had been guilty of treason and should have been put in prison, instead of glorified into a heroic icon. Walker was greeted with racial slurs. He sat on the library's floor along with several other African American protesters. The police arrested those who would not leave and took them to jail. Walker was fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days for organizing the demonstration.

Wyatt Tee Walker was born on August 16, 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts, USA.