Walter Lively

alt=Walter Lively, wearing a suit and tie, walks down an empty city street in 1968. Walter Hall Lively Jr. (August 27, 1942 – September 10, 1976) was an African American civil rights and socialist activist in Baltimore, Maryland. A key figure in the Black Power and Black Arts Movements in Baltimore, Lively founded and headed several important organizations devoted to Black liberation and ending poverty. According to the Baltimore Sun, “National civil rights leaders publicly predicted he would be Baltimore’s first Black mayor.” His unexpected death at age 34 abruptly ended his political career.

Early life and education Lively was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1942, to Walter Lively and Lillian Blake. He was the oldest of five children. Walter Lively Sr., who was a bombardier-navigator with the 477th Bomber Squadron ("Red Tails," Tuskegee Airmen) and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton, 1950) worked as an accountant. With alcohol taking over his life, Walter Sr. left the family, forcing them to go on welfare. They moved to the Tasker Homes, a public housing project in the Grays Ferry neighborhood of the South Philadelphia section of Philadelphia.

At 12 years old, he began working for a huckster, or man who sold produce from a cart, eventually taking over for the older man. When he was 14 he helped black newspaper delivery boys in his neighborhood organize a successful picket line against the local newspaper distributor who paid them low wages beginning his career as a community organizer.

Lively graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1960. After graduation, he worked in construction and as a lab technician at the University of Pennsylvania where he also attended night school.

Civil rights activism Civil rights activists fought against segregation and discrimination around the nation through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, Lively joined hundreds of black and white activists targeting segregated businesses along Route 40, which went through Maryland, by conducting sit-ins at these establishments. A few months earlier, African dignitaries traveling to Washington, DC, found themselves barred from eating at restaurants along the route. International attention and pressure were applied to the federal government to eliminate this discrimination. The Lagos Daily Times of Nigeria wrote, “the United States forfeits its claim to world leadership,” due to this mistreatment. Lively was arrested during the Route 40 sit-ins. The Baltimore project chose the name UJOIN, or Union for Jobs or Income Now, to reflect their commitment to organizing unemployed people.

U-JOIN Under Lively's leadership, U-JOIN became one of the most radical activist organizations in Baltimore's Black community. Baltimore Sun reporter James Dilts describes U-JOIN as “a potentially revolutionary group because it's committed to letting the people decide. It's a militant group because it's biased toward working, poor, black people. It's a radical group because it wants democratic control and basic change.” While U-JOIN worked on several issues, its focus was always on empowering impoverished and working-class Black people and confronting state institutions that oppressed them.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced a massive federal government effort to end poverty. Called the War on Poverty, it created a new agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which distributed money to local offices to fight poverty in their area. In Baltimore, these decisions were made by the Community Action Agency and its board of directors, the Community Action Commission, and were based on A Plan for Action, a blueprint for how to spend the antipoverty funds in Baltimore.

In early 1965, U-JOIN created an alternative to A Plan for Action, which put poor people themselves in charge of decision-making. Their plan included a Non-Profit Housing Association, a Neighborhood Job Corps, and a Neighborhood Commons, and would be organized through neighborhood groups that would send representatives to area councils and the city's council. The city council ignored U-JOIN's plan and passed its own program, though some funds were given to U-JOIN for its programs. U-JOIN and other Black civil rights organizations joined to create the Anti-Poverty Action Committee, which charged that the CAA and Commission did not represent Baltimore's Black communities because they didn't include residents from those neighborhoods and enough Black people. Demonstrating their intersectional approach to these issues, U-JOIN critiqued the appointment of Buddy Young, a Black former Colts football player, to the antipoverty commission, because he didn't represent working-class and unemployed Black Baltimore residents and had missed several meetings. Young was forced to resign.

In 1966, U-JOIN, under Lively, founded Mother Rescuers from Poverty, an organization of women on welfare who advocated for better treatment and living conditions. It was the first welfare rights organization in Baltimore. The group organized rent strikes against private landlords, leading to the formation of Tenants for Justice in Housing, which pushed for rent escrow legislation that allowed tenants to withhold rent if their living conditions were poor.

Political beliefs Lively inspired many people in Baltimore into activism. He called his vision of activism “responsible radicalism.” At an event commemorating the first anniversary of the Baltimore police raid on the Black Panther Party headquarters in the city, lively argued “We have not yet successfully developed a relationship with the mass of black people. Revolutions are made by people...The struggle has had armchair revolutionaries for too long.”

Although he was a “member of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party,” Lively was “registered as an independent” politically, suggesting his pragmatism. While he was a socialist and those ideals undergirded his activism, he understood that to raise funds and gain enough political clout to be taken seriously by Baltimore's Black and white political leaders, he had to be aware of his public persona. When journalist James Dilts profiled Lively in the Baltimore Sun magazine, he noted that in 1965 Lively had a beard and long hair, but when he ran for city council, he cut his hair and began wearing a suit.

Riot and after After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968, Baltimore, like many cities, experienced a riot or uprising. As a well-known Black activist in the neighborhoods where the riot was happening, Lively tried to calm things down. However, police arrested him because they said he was suspicious in areas where arson had taken place. The charges were later dropped.

Soon after the riot, Lively was appointed director of the Urban Coalition, a partnership between business, religious, labor, and local government groups to address issues of unemployment, bad housing, and poor schools. However, conservative members of the Baltimore city council attacked Lively because of his arrest during the riot and demanded that the council decrease its contribution to the Urban Coalition by the amount of Lively's salary as director ($13,000).

By 1968, “Lively had been jailed 22 times, the longest for 6 days in North Carolina. When asked what he was doing in NC, he said, “We were trying to become free.”

Cultural activism In the late 1960s, Lively founded a print shop and publishing company called Liberation House at 432 E. North Avenue, which was followed by a bookstore with the same name in the early 1970s. The print shop printed material for various groups involved in civil rights and Black Power activities and trained young men in how to use the machines. In 1968, during the uprising following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Baltimore, Liberation Press printed leaflets to distribute to store owners in Black neighborhoods urging them to close their stores to honor King's death. Called the Black Community Museum, it was modeled after the Anacostia Community Museum. According to participants, the Museum hosted a theater group and writing workshops. It offered events as well, including a talk by Reverend Vernon Dobson. A newspaper reporter in 1976, however, found the museum building vacant.