May 3, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Walker running towards a brighter future
Ex-civil rights activist now ‘healing racial divide’
by LEN LEAR
and SARAH KLEM

RegE Walker and his daughter, Rana, have both contributed significantly to making the city a better place in which to live. (Photo by Len Lear)

Germantown resident RegE Walker may not have a Ph.D. In African-American History, but his R.le.D. (Doctor of Real-life Experience), among other things, certainly qualifies him to teach “The Journey to Freedom: Healing the Racial Divide,” a course currently being offered by Mt. Airy Learning Tree (MALT).

Walker, 65, grew up in Nicetown, attended Simon Gratz High School, followed by La Salle College for two years and then graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1971 with a degree in economics and a specialty in international business. This was at a time when an African-American student was as rare a sight at the Wharton School as a kosher deli in Saudi Arabia.

But the defining period of Walker’s life was in the summer of 1966, in the middle of the civil rights revolution. Walker and many other young, idealistic, courageous volunteers from the North, mostly African-Americans, ventured to the deep South to become jumper cables in overcoming centuries of racist oppression. They worked with local blacks on economic development projects, voting rights, etc. Walker was part of a group from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was frequently in the news at the time.

Beatings, threats, intimidation — even murder — of civil rights workers and local residents who cooperated with them was not uncommon. And all-white local police forces almost always did nothing to investigate or solve racist crimes. In many cases they even participated in the crimes themselves or gave tacit approval to racially-motivated violence.

“We lived in a tent city in Green County, Alabama,” recalled Walker, “and one white man said to me, ‘Boy, you don’t talk like you come from here. Where you from?’ When I told him Philadelphia, he said, ‘Boy, you better go back where you came from, or I’ll blow your brains out.’ There were threats on a regular basis. We were always looking over our shoulders because we knew that anything (violent) could happen at any time, and there’d be no (law enforcement) people we could turn to for help. Fortunately, none of the threats were carried out against us.”

After returning home from Alabama, Walker did some business development of his own. He opened a bookstore, Community Book Mart, at 52nd and Walnut Streets in 1967, and it remained in business until 1975.

But Walker avoids complacency as if it were an IRS audit. After 1975 he became a consultant to small businesses, was a counselor at Lincoln University from 1987 to 1992 and then operated a personal growth, development and counseling service.

In 1989 he founded the Forerunners International Institute, which took teenagers, primarily African-American, on trips to Africa which the kids paid for with their own fundraising. “We showed them where our people came from. This helped to free them from their deeper, inner lack of awareness.” Walker took the youths to the first and second Worldwide Conferences for African Students in 1992 and 1993. While in Africa, Walker was a guest lecturer at the Dakar (Senegal) branch of Suffolk University of Massachusetts. In all, he made six trips to Africa with students, but finally gave it up in 2000 because “the recruiting just became too much work.”

Currently, Walker is building on the Forerunners’ program and his civil rights and business experiences with his five-week MALT course, “Healing the Racial Divide.”

You might say that in our society, a great many people feel like they are a tuxedo, and the world is a pair of brown shoes. The purpose of Walker’s course is to develop the liberating awareness of powerful unconscious forces within oneself and to use that awareness to heal the divide within oneself and then within society, whether that divide is a hiccup or a hurricane.

For example, the recent Don Imus controversy can be seen in this context. “In the movie, The Wolfman, actor Lon Chaney is a perfectly nice guy until he sees a full moon; then he turns into The Wolfman, and there’s nothing he can do about it,” said Walker. “By the same token, people like Imus have this monster inside them, and they think there is nothing they can do about it. Imus woke up the next morning and said he was sorry and that ‘this is not who I am.’ I think he was right that the monster was not all that he is.”

Walker’s entire family has impressive credentials. His wife, Gerri, was the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position of Philadelphia Commerce Director, which she held from 1988 to 1992 during the Wilson Goode Administration. She was also City Representative.

Walker’s daughter, Rana, 40, who has a Master’s in Education and Counseling Psychology from Temple University, is a mental health therapist and wellness coach (and a certified kick boxing instructor). She also starred as one of two “life coaches” on the first season of the NBC-TV show, Starting Over. Rana won a daytime Emmy in 2005 for her role as co-host of the show. She was also a health coach for the Discovery Health Channel’s six-part mini-series, “Health Cops: Sentenced to Death,” which aired in 2002.

Rana and her mom also founded a “mobile wellness” company in 1999, Diamond Cutter, which offers adventure tours, “spirit-enhancing retreats” and a variety of alternative health and fitness services for individual and corporate clients. (www.diamondcutterllc.com)

RegE and Gerri also have a son, Tschaka, 39, a statistician and small business developer for the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corp.

For more information about the MALT course, call 215-843-9427.