Alexander Walters

Religious leader and activist

• Born: August 1, 1858
• Birthplace: Bardstown, Kentucky
• Died: February 2, 1917
• Place of death: Brooklyn, New York

An energetic African Methodist Episcopal bishop, Walters was the leading force in the National Afro-American Council, one of the first major civil rights organizations for African Americans in the United States.

Early Life

Alexander Walters was born a slave on August 1, 1858, in Bardstown, Kentucky. His parents, Henry Walters and Harriet Mathers, also were slaves; Henry was the son of a slave owner. Harriet was a devout Methodist of strong character. Alexander Walters was the fifth of eight children.

Walters was well educated in private schools. He was an outstanding student and was selected by the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church for training for the ministry. AME Zion was a progressive denomination that had branches throughout the United States. Walters graduated from school in 1875. In 1877, he married his first wife, Katie Knox. They would have five children before Katie died in 1896. In 1877, Walters was licensed as a preacher in the Kentucky AME Zion Churches. The next year, he was appointed pastor of AME Zion churches in Corydon and Smith, Kentucky.

Recognizing his capabilities, the AME Zion Conferences elected Walters to successively higher positions in the denomination. With great energy, he set about reviving numerous churches in Kentucky. In 1883, he was appointed pastor of the Stockton Street Church in San Francisco, a historic church that had fallen on hard times and that Walters helped revive. In 1886, he was briefly pastor of the Chattanooga Church before being appointed to the Mother AME Zion Church in New York City, where the denomination had been founded in October, 1796. On May 4, 1892, Walters was elected by the AME Zion General Conference as a bishop of the church; at thirty-four years of age, he was one of the youngest bishops ever appointed by that denomination. His Episcopal district included Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, California, West Tennessee, Mississippi, and Oregon. AME Zion was a socially oriented denomination that emphasized education, progress in society, and civil rights. In 1896, Walters’s wife died, and he married Emeline Virginia Bird. They would have one child before Emeline’s death in 1902. Walters later married Lelia Coleman.

Life’s Work

As Walters advanced through the ranks of the church, he became more active in working for the benefit of the African American community. He was dismayed by the plight of African Americans and began to organize efforts to win civil rights. He placed blame on the Republican Party for the political compromise of 1877, in which the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in return for securing the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes. Walters wrote that the Republican Party had “sold out” African Americans. In March, 1896, he spoke out against white labor unions for excluding African Americans from industrial jobs.

Alarmed in 1898 by the increase of violence against African Americans, Walters assisted the journalist T. Thomas Fortune in reestablishing the National Afro-American Council as the leading civil rights organization in the country. Many leaders of the African American community joined the council. Walters was elected president, and the group immediately spoke out against lynching, the convict-lease system, railroad segregation, and discrimination in the workplace as the greatest evils facing African Americans. He served as the council’s president from 1898 to 1904 and again from 1906 to 1907. In addition to Walters and Fortune, Booker T. Washington and Congressman George White were mainstays of the council. As president, Walters advocated for the use of the term “Afro-American” in place of “colored” or “Negro.” However, because of rifts in the National Afro-American Council, Walters launched the National Independent Political League in 1907. For the rest of his life, Walters was a strong advocate of literacy, industrial work, and accumulation of resources as the surest path to civil rights.

In 1900, Walters was elected president of the Pan-African Association, which was dedicated to assisting people of African descent throughout the world. He grew increasingly interested in African affairs and served as the nonresident AME Zion bishop of Africa from 1904 to 1908, visiting Africa and the West Indies in furtherance of his duties. In 1908, Walters denounced the traditional allegiance of African Americans to the Republican Party and became an ardent Democrat. As head of the National Colored Democratic League, he made several speeches describing how the party of Abraham Lincoln had betrayed African Americans. In this manner, Walters anticipated one of the seismic shifts of American political history: the switch of allegiance of African Americans from the Republican to the Democratic Party over the course of the twentieth century.

Walters originally was an ally of Booker T. Washington and a supporter of his gradualist approach to civil rights. By 1906, however, his sympathies had shifted toward the more activist perspective of W. E. B. Du Bois. In light of the rise of racial violence against African Americans, Walters became an outspoken critic of Washington’s pacifist approach. He threw his considerable influence behind Du Bois and the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving on its first national committee. As an ardent Democrat, Walters was disappointed when Woodrow Wilson’s election as president in 1912 did not bring appointments of African Americans to federal positions, but he apparently did not object to Wilson’s segregationist policies. Walters died in Brooklyn, New York, on February 2, 1917.

Significance

Walters’s work as a bishop for the AME Zion Church led him into civil rights work for the African American community. He was appalled by the conditions of African American life he saw in his pastoral travels, and he was alarmed by the upsurge of violence against African Americans in the waning years of the nineteenth century. As a result, Walters helped launch one of the first major civil rights organizations for African Americans in American history, the National Afro-American Council. In its major goals, the National Afro-American Council was not a success, but it paved the way for the founding of the NAACP and the National Urban League. Walters’s work in the National Afro-American Council reflects his prescience in civil rights matters. He foreshadowed much of the future Civil Rights movement in its leadership by African American clergy, the transition of the bulk of African Americans from supporters of the Republican Party to mainstays of the Democratic Party, his insistence on integration of industrial labor, and even his advocacy of the term “Afro-American” as a more accurate appellation for African Americans.

Bibliography

Justesen, Benjamin. Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. History of the National Afro-American Council as the first national civil rights organization in the United States and as predecessor to the NAACP and the National Urban League. Illustrated.

Norrell, Robert. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009. A comprehensive biography of the multidimensional Booker T. Washington, who advocated an accommodationist approach to uplifting African Americans. The author describes how Walters’s increasing activism turned him from an ally of Washington to a critic.

Walters, Alexander. My Life and Work. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1917. Walters’s memoirs include lengthy quotations from the resolutions of the various religious and civil rights groups in which he was involved. He also explains his views on racial equality and civil rights.