Wyatt Tee Walker

Wyatt Tee Walker is Senior Pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ. He enjoys an enviable record as pastor/theologian, civil rights leader, and essayist. He is a double graduate of Virginia Union University (BS, 1950, M.Div., 1953) and holds an earned doctorate from Rochester Theological Center (D. Min. 1975). His graduate studies and research have taken him to the University of Ife in Nigeria and the University of Ghana at Legon. An exhibiting artist, as well as a composer of sacred music, Jesse Jackson has called him "Harlem's Renaissance Man" because of his multiple gifts and varied careers.

Over the last decade, he has emerged as the nation's foremost authority on the music of the African-American religious experience by the sheer dint of his productivity and dogged research. Following the publication of his landmark work, "Somebody's Calling My Name," which is considered a classic in many quarters, five additional works in the field of ethnomusicology have come from his pen. The three-volume "Spirits that Dwell in Deep Woods," has been hailed as pioneer work, which he continues to pursue. No one has written as much or as carefully on the meter music of the African-American Church and the "Soweto Diary," a personal eyewitness account of the Free Elections in South Africa. Walker served as an international Election Observer in the township of Soweto in April 1994.

Widely traveled (ninety-seven countries), this Harlem Pastor is regarded internationally as a human rights activist. In October 1994, Nelson Mandela's first stop in the United States as President of the Republic of South Africa was the worship service of Walker's Harlem Church. The week following, he was the first African-American to meet with Chairman Yasir Arafat since the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and Jericho, both events underscoring his involvement as an Anti-apartheid activist and an apologist for Palestinian self-determination. He is a six-year term World Commissioner of the Programme to Combat Racism of the World Council of Churches, and Secretary General of the Religious Action Network of the American Committee on Africa. He is now President of ACOA. Earlier this year, at the invitation of the Secretary General of the All Africa Council of Churches, he was the guest preacher during the High Holy Week Services in Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa.

As Chairman of the Consortium for Central Harlem Development, he is responsible for $100 million in housing construction in Central Harlem. He is Chairman of the Board of National Action Network, headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton. In the 1993 Ebony magazine poll, he was named one of the fifteen greatest African preachers in the United States.