February 18, 2008
Walker shaped Statesville literature
By O.C. Stonestreet
Here’s what used to be known as a “Horatio Alger Story,” a story of a person born to humble circumstances who rose to success through dogged determination and just plain hard work, sometimes called “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.” This story is appropriate for black history month and stands as a lesson to all of us.
James Robert Walker Sr. was born on Jan. 10, 1885, in a log cabin in Henderson, Ky. His parents died while he was an infant and he was raised by grandparents.
In a 1955 R&L interview, he said that he had no recollection of his father at all and the only recollection of his mother was “so vague I often think it’s a dream. I realize, though, that my parents, who were living in Henderson at the time of my birth, were very poor.”
As a young man he attended St. Clement’s Mission, an Episcopal school in Henderson and studied there through the seventh grade.
In 1904, when he was 19, he entered Hampton Institute in Hampton, Va. He worked on the institute’s 600-acre farm as a milker his first year, working during the day and attending classes at night. His grandparents died during his freshman year, which added to his financial difficulties.
One of his instructors inspired him to persevere.
The Rev. J.M. Munday took Walker and some other students to a classroom window, pointed to a drunkard staggering down the street and told the group that they could be like the drunkard or they could “be another Booker T. Washington.”
While at Hampton, Walker saw the obituary and a photograph of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black poet, on the door to the institute’s library.
Walker’s daughter, Muriel, related what happened next: “At that moment he felt a sharp blow on the shoulder and a voice in his ear that told him, ‘You’re next, write!’ ”
When his academic education was interrupted by the lack of funds, he found employment at the shipyards of Newport News, Va., making a dime an hour for a 10-hour day.
In 1913, he was accepted at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro.
After two years, his formal education was interrupted again and he left NC A&T, returning to the shipyards in Newport News during World War I.
After the war, Walker went back to NC A&T and to pay for his classes took the worst job at the college: tending pigs on the college’s farm.
According to the R&L interview, Walker said he “would haul slop in a horse-drawn wagon and stayed in the animal barns instead of on campus his first year. Working thusly, he attended night school throughout his first year and then, in his second, entered day school.”
He did this until he graduated valedictorian of his class in 1921 with a degree in agriculture. His speech was titled “In Spite of It.”
For two years following graduation, he taught at the Hereford County Training School in Ahoskie. Busy as he was, he continued to jot down verse in his spare time.
The year 1923 was a pivotal one in Walker’s life. He moved to Iredell/Rowan and taught at the R.A. Clement School in Cleveland, N.C., continuing to teach there and in area schools for the next 25 years.
That same year, he married Ethel Lee Dockery, the daughter of the Rev. Zander A. Dockery of Statesville, a leader in Iredell County black education and religion.
The couple eventually had three sons and five daughters.
In 1923, Walker self-published 1,000 copies of his first book of poetry titled “Poetical Diets.”
Walker continued to teach in black public schools until his retirement in 1948.
From 1948 to 1953, he served as a special instructor with the Veterans’ Administration Farm Program in North Wilkesboro.
In 1953, he began “poetry reading tours” at black high schools and colleges in the state, an activity he pursued for at least a dozen years. Within the black community he was respectfully known as “Professor Walker.”
In 1955, Comet Press of New York published his second book of poems, “Be Firm My Hope.”
Walker was quoted as saying, “I’m not a racial poet, but one who writes for the sake of humanity.” Of his “Be Firm My Hope,” he said, “The entire volume is dedicated to humanity with divine intuition as its motive. Even when I’m at my work I will look toward the sky and say, ‘Reveal it to me, Master,’ and then I write as the Lord would have me do.”
New York’s Carlton Press published his third volume of poetry, “Musings of Childhood,” in 1960 and published his “Menus of Love” (1963) and 1965’s “Speak Nature.”
His wife passed away in 1981, and two years later, Walker, 98, died at the home of a daughter in New Jersey. “Rural Life,” to be his sixth book of verse, was unpublished.
The poet and his wife are buried in Statesville’s Belmont Cemetery.
At the time of Walker’s death, he and his wife were survived by their eight children, 25 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren.
Walker was an elder and Sunday school teacher at Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Statesville, a church his father-in-law pastored, and it was Walker who suggested the name Calvary Presbyter-ian Church when Broad Street Presbyterian and three other local churches merged in 1967.
Broad Street Presbyterian Church stood about where the R&L building stands today on East Broad Street.
The old church building, which was for some time abandoned, was demolished in the fall of 1955 and some of the brick were reused in the foundation of the R&L building.
