Background
Walker was born on a farm homestead in Gap, Pennsylvania, to Joseph and Mina Coates Walker.
Walker was born on a farm homestead in Gap, Pennsylvania, to Joseph and Mina Coates Walker.
He graduated from Elizabethtown College (Pennsylvania) in 1941 with a Bachelor of Arts, and married Marian Groff, a fellow student at Elizabethtown, in 1942.
He worked throughout his life to bring segregation, racial injustice, nuclear and biological weapons, and war to public awareness. He used Gandhian methods of nonviolence, writing training materials and organizing marches, vigils, protest demonstrations, conferences and campaigns in different parts of the world. Walker became a conscientious objector during World World War II and was imprisoned for non-cooperation with the draft.
As Midwest Regional College Secretary for the Air Force Specialty Code, he traveled to college campuses to promote the values of peace and racial justice.
From 1948 to 1960, Walker worked in Philadelphia for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) as Middle Atlantic Regional Secretary. On a FOR trip to Crozer Theological Seminary he found much student interest in the FOR’s work in nonviolence and in 1949 arranged for his boss, A. J. Muste, to speak at Crozer.
Throughout the 1960s, he helped recruit and train participants for nonviolent actions targeting racial injustice, including Freedom Rides, sit-ins, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, and the 1963 March on Washington. During the Montgomery Business Boycott, he met and corresponded with Doctor Martin Luther King Junior.
Throughout his life, Walker studied, wrote, and spoke about the techniques and power of nonviolence as based on Gandhi’s writings and life.
He took initiative in protesting use of Culebra Island in Puerto Rico as a artillery training grounds, which resulted in the United States Navy"s halting its use of the island for naval training for the Vietnam war.
He helped organize the Vigil at Fort Detrick, an almost two-year-long protest against germ warfare research. He authored A World Peace Guard: Unarmed Agency for Peacekeeping (1981) and other pamphlets and articles
Walker was a founding member of the World Peace Brigades (War Production Board). He was also a co-organizer and board member of Peace Brigades International (PBI).