Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Spurning the role of supervisor, he took his wife, his two children, a few other preachers, and several students to the all-white Petersburg public library. His budding media consciousness inspired him to appear wearing a clerical collar for the first time in his life. His flamboyant admiration of Vernon Johns inspired the peculiar act by which he violated the segregation laws: before the eyes of the gathered police and reporters, Walker asked the librarian to give him the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Johns, who admired some of Lee’s qualities while despising his cause, often had cited Freeman’s book to Walker in his Civil War discourses, and it tickled Walker to think that white Southerners would arrest him for trying to read about their most cherished hero.