NEW YORK (ABP) — A Baptist activist best known for his opposition to the United States' nearly 50-year-old trade embargo with Cuba died Sept. 7 after suffering a massive heart attack at age 80.
Walker's August 2009 photograph with Fidel Castro was the first public picture of the ailing former Cuban president in half a year.
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Lucius Walker, an African-American pastor and community organizer, was director of Pastors for Peace, a group that has sent caravans of humanitarian aid to Cuba every year since 1992. Walker's groups would refuse to apply to the United States government for a license to travel to Cuba. Instead, they would route it through third countries like Mexico and Canada — in open defiance of what Walker denounced as "an immoral blockade" that hurt Cuban citizens.
Ken Sehested, former executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, said Walker was "something of a hero" in Cuba, both to Baptists and the population in general. On his 21st and last trip in August 2009, Walker met with Cuban President Raul Castro and ex-president Fidel Castro. During the visit he was photographed with Fidel in the first public pictures of the ailing former president in half a year.
Walker was founding director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization in 1967. After working as associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches from 1973 through 1978, he returned to IFCO, which describes itself as the only national ecumenical foundation committed exclusively to support community organizing.
In the 1980s he criticized the United States' foreign policy in Nicaragua. He led a study delegation to the country in 1988 and was wounded in an ambush by U.S.-backed Contra rebels that killed two Nicaraguans and wounded 27 others.
That experience inspired him to organize Pastors for Peace material-aid caravans to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba and Chiapas, Mexico. Since 1992 the caravans claim to have transported more than 3,000 tons of donated aid to Cuba, including hurricane-reconstruction supplies, medical and educational equipment, computers and school buses.
Walker was a member of numerous boards, including as a trustee of Andover Newton Theological School, the Boston-area Baptist seminary where he earned his master-of-divinity degree. He received numerous awards, including the Edwin T. Dahlberg Peace Award from American Baptist Churches USA, first awarded to Martin Luther King in 1964, in 1989.
The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization sent out a message calling Walker a "beloved, heroic, prophetic leader" and noted his passing with "immeasurable sadness."
Cuba's Communist Party daily newspaper, Granma, wrote: "Cubans, in gratitude, have to say that we don't want to think of a world without Lucius Walker."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.