By Ken Epstein

Prominent civil rights attorney and activist Walter Riley recently went on radio station KPFA 94.1 to discuss his new book co-authored with local veteran organizer Jesse Strauss: “Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley.”

Widely known in Oakland for his unifying leadership on issues of social justice and human rights, Riley is also recognized for his famous son, Raymond “Boots” Riley, a rap artist, political activist, and successful filmmaker, whose latest film, “I Love Boosters,” is now in theaters and capturing national attention.

Born in North Carolina, Riley has lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and Detroit, but his longtime home is Oakland, California.

Over the years, he was a leader in the South against Jim Crow, participated as a student in the historic 1968 San Francisco State University strike that created Black Studies and Ethnic Studies in the U.S. and scored victories in the fight for open college admissions.

He was also a labor organizer and was involved in early Black Panther Party formations, anti-war protests, and was a leader of the Progressive Labor Party, a pro-Mao, Marxist Leninist party.

In an interview on KPFA’s “Upfront” with host Brian Edwards-Tiekert on June 18, he discussed some of his formative experiences, born in 1944 to a family of sharecroppers who worked on a tobacco farm near Durham, North Carolina.

“I came from a farming family, the ninth child of 11 children,” Riley said. “My mom and dad got married as teenagers, and they were together for their entire lives. Growing up in this large family, we had to deal with various aspects of what it meant to live in an economically depressed area with parents who had come through what they called “Hoover times” (the Great Depression) in the South.

“They were proud of every one of their children when they took some stand, to develop and show some sense of dignity,” he said.

In his neighborhood, slavery was not a distant memory. There are many people “who knew firsthand what it was to have family members that had lived as enslaved people and lived in communities where enslaved people had lived.

“(Under tenant farming), the landowner negotiated for the entire family: the farmer, the wife, the children – everybody was involved on the farm. Kids were often engaged. We had to shovel, hoe tobacco to keep the weeds from taking over, to make sure that tobacco worms didn’t eat up the tobacco. If a child was old enough to plow, they would walk behind a horse or mule and plow a field, working from sunup to sundown,” he said.

The houses did not have indoor bathrooms, running water or electricity. “A lot of the names in the Black community were the same names as these slave owners. We could see the names of folks on the streets, street names of people who had enslaved people, and they were symbols to me of a world that did not see me as a human being, that has not treated my ancestors as humans, has treated us as chattel to be sold, to be owned, to be property,” Riley said

“When we were counted by our government, we were counted only for the purposes of allowing white people, white men, to have a vote.”

By 1950, when he was 6 years old, his family moved to another house, leaving tenant farming. His father took a job in construction.

“My parents wanted the younger kids to have education,” he continued. “The older kids had to work on the farms. By the time I came along, I was the second child born in a hospital. “My parents looked forward to younger kids to have more sense of independence from the economic and social depravities that they saw around them.”

Watching television, he became aware of the suffering under Jim Crow, including the lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till in 1955 and Mack Parker in 1959.

When he was 13, he joined a picket line in town in front of a variety store chain that did not hire Black people and became active in the Civil Rights Movement. By time he was in high school, he had become a leader in the local chapter of the NAACP and met Malcolm X and later Medgar Evers, leaders who were both assassinated.

Married and with a child, he moved with his family in the early 1960s to San Francisco, attending San Francisco State University while working full time.

He participated in the San Francisco State University strike, the longest student strike in U.S. history, where students and their supporters prevailed in the face of mass arrests and daily violent police attacks.

While many people remember the strike for its historic victory – the creation of the first Black Studies and Ethnic Studies programs in the country. “But open admissions was the thing,” he said. “Open admissions had to do with people being able to go to school for free. People should be able to go to school just because they come here and say, ‘I want to go to school. I want an education’ (because) we live in a rich country.”

Studying Marxism, including dialectical materialism, he gradually began to understand structure of the system that needs to be changed, he said. “It requires a lot of study, and it still does.”

By Ken Epstein

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