Thomas Calhoun Walker (16 June 1862–5 November 1953), attorney, entrepreneur, and civic leader, was born into slavery in Gloucester County. His parents, Thomas Walker and Grace Herbert Walker, lived on separate farms; Walker and his siblings lived with their mother. During the Civil War, when the United States Army was in the vicinity, his mother's owner spirited Walker and his family to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Union forces later brought them to Richmond, where Walker's father found them at Lumpkin's Jail, the once-notorious site of slave auctions that was then serving as a shelter for freed people.
As a child Walker lived for a time in the home of a white family who had owned him, but did not attend school. He later learned the rudiments of reading and writing, and when he was about eighteen years old, he and a group of friends sought to attend Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). When they failed the school's entrance exam, Walker refused to leave the campus and subsequently attended a night school program that enabled him and his friends to qualify for admission. Working on the school's farm during the day, they attended classes each evening. After graduating on 16 June 1883, Walker taught at a Gloucester school for about six years, while he farmed a twelve-acre plot of land. On 11 September 1889 he married Hampton classmate Annie A. Williams, a teacher and South Carolina native, in Chelsea, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where she had lived. They had three daughters, all of whom became schoolteachers.
About the mid-1880s Walker witnessed the trial of a fourteen-year-old-girl accused of stealing. Having no one to defend her, she was convicted and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. Believing that legal representation could have changed the outcome, Walker resolved to become an attorney. He studied law with two Gloucester County attorneys—both former Confederate officers—and in June 1886 qualified to practice law in Gloucester, the first African American in the county to do so. T. C. Walker, as he was generally known, was oftentimes referred to as "Lawyer Walker" for the remainder of his life.
Walker's farm allowed him to provide legal services to African American clients who sometimes could not pay. Many of his cases involved defending African Americans on charges related to what he called "Jim Crow skirmishes." The cases he dreaded most were those in which an African American male was accused of raping a white woman, often a spurious charge and always one difficult to defend. Walker went to great lengths to protect his clients, including having Black men guard a jail before a trial to prevent a suspect from being hanged in what he called a "lynching bee." He also took a special interest in the welfare of children who had become ensnared in the criminal justice system. Sometimes referred to as a "pied piper" for his efforts on their behalf, he placed thousands of delinquent and orphaned boys and girls with foster families, including his own. Respected by state leaders, Walker served on various state boards and commissions that investigated issues of race, foster care, and juvenile justice reform.
Beyond his legal career Walker was indefatigable in working for African American prosperity by entreating Blacks to purchase land, build a home, pay taxes, and exercise their citizenship rights. Based on his own experience, education made all prosperity possible, and the lack of it, he believed, was akin to slavery of one's mind. Walker viewed petitioning for adequate schools not as a call for social equality, of which white Virginians were deeply apprehensive, but as what Black Virginians were owed as taxpayers. He spoke before Black and white audiences across the state and region on behalf of education, especially in rural schools. Walker helped found the Negro Organization Society, established at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, to spur community activism and Black education in the state.
Late in the 1880s Walker worked with another former Hampton student and others to establish the Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial High School (also known as the Cappahosic School), the first secondary school for African Americans in the county. The curriculum followed the Hampton model with practical subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with a rigid daily schedule of classes, devotion, and chores (which helped cover the cost of tuition). The school soon became affiliated with the American Missionary Association, which installed a new principal in 1899, after which Walker no longer served on the board of trustees and largely withdrew his support.
Working as an agent with Hampton Institute, he raised money for new school buildings and equipment in communities throughout the state. Walker also secured the initial funding and land to open the Gloucester Training School in 1921, the county's only free public secondary school to educate Black children beyond the seventh grade. With financial support from northern charitable organizations, including the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and local African Americans, the school opened with grades one through eight, but soon expanded to the eleventh grade. Walker served as its principal for more than a decade on a volunteer basis, and the curriculum largely consisted of industrial training, such as carpentry, bricklaying, nursing, and domestic science.
Education and health intersected in the lack of proper training for African American medical professionals. With Black mortality rates much higher than those for white people, Walker promoted better access to healthcare, as well as expanded educational opportunities for African Americans as doctors and nurses. A strong proponent of temperance, he worked with Black congregations to spur support for a successful local option ban on alcohol in Gloucester and other nearby counties.
Striving to cultivate land ownership among African Americans, in 1890 Walker founded the Gloucester Land and Brick Company to assist Blacks in Gloucester and other nearby counties to buy property. He convinced white landowners to sell land to African Americans through the company and often was personally responsible for receiving payments. Wishing to be aspirational, Walker included the word brick in the company's name because traditionally white-owned houses had brick chimneys, but Black-owned dwellings had less-safe clay chimneys. According to Walker, the company eventually facilitated the sale of about ten thousand acres of land to several hundred families. He arranged for a federal demonstration agent to teach efficient methods of farming and organized a local agricultural association. The 1930 census recorded that 881 out of 995 Black families in Gloucester County owned their homes, which was reportedly the highest rate of Black property ownership in any county in the United States.
Practicing what he preached regarding land ownership, on 12 May 1886 Walker purchased thirty-three and four-fifths acres of land for $380, and sold the property on 4 September 1889 to Annie Williams a week before he married her. In 1888 he bought a two-acre lot near the courthouse in Gloucester and in 1890 bought ten acres a few miles away. As an attorney he acted as a trustee for scores of land transactions, almost certainly for fellow African Americans. As one of the trustees of the Bethel Baptist Church of Gloucester, he helped petition the American Baptist Home Mission Society for $200 to build a church. Walker declared proudly in a Hampton alumni book published in 1893 that he owned "sixty-four acres of land, two house lots at the county seat, a horse and buggy, cows, etc., and a law library valued at $150." He continued to acquire property, and thirty years later he owned more than 280 acres in ten separate tracts. Throughout his career, Walker continued to farm on the weekends, and in 1938 he boasted in a Norfolk Journal and Guide feature story of owning a 125-acre spread.
Active in state Republican Party politics, Walker spoke at district and state conventions where he emphasized that expansion of business, education, and property ownership were dependent on African Americans’ exercising their political rights. With the support of Black and white voters, he won elections as a justice of the peace and to the county board of supervisors. In 1898 he was appointed customs collector at Tappahannock, a post he held about four years.
During the Great Depression, Walker served as an advisor on African American affairs for the Virginia Emergency Relief Administration and the subsequent Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration) in Virginia. The state's sole African American in the agency's administrative structure, he worked to construct and modernize houses, schools, community centers, and libraries. Walker organized training programs and found employment relief for African Americans. Years later he recalled reducing the number of Black Virginians on relief rolls from 11,000 to about 900. Walker also helped establish an African American unit of the Federal Writers' Project in Virginia and located Black writers to contribute to The Negro in Virginia (1940), at the time the best history of the state's African Americans.
Walker described the "psychological effect" of Jim Crow segregation as "the same as a quarantine sign for a contagious disease. It generates a strange fear as of something 'catching.' The distance widens between the races; they become more suspicious and more ignorant of each other." Despite the obstacles that Blacks faced, Walker insisted that issues involving racial tension could be improved "if it is mutually decided by both races to work them out through temperate, intelligent, and persistent application of good will." When faced with Jim Crow, he entreated Blacks to behave courteously and not reflect white antagonism. Walker's method of racial cooperation drew criticism from some African Americans who favored a more confrontational strategy. Still, even those who disagreed with his methods could not deny his dedication and success.
Walker's wife died on 25 February 1912. He married Elizabeth City County native Ellen N. Young on 19 September 1914 in the city of Hampton. They did not have any children, although they adopted one boy into their household about 1928 and cared for numerous other boys in their home before she died on 7 June 1950. Walker received an honorary doctorate from Virginia Union University in 1951 and practiced law until shortly before his death. Thomas Calhoun Walker died of a coronary occlusion at a Hampton hospital on 5 November 1953. As many as 2,000 admirers reportedly attended his funeral at Bethel Baptist Church in Gloucester. He was buried in the church's cemetery, next to the body of his second wife.
After Walker's death, county leaders named the Gloucester Training School after him, and in the twenty-first century the Thomas Calhoun Walker Education Center at the site is named in his honor. In 1954 Walker's portrait was installed at the Gloucester County courthouse, possibly making him the first African American to be so honored in Virginia. During the unveiling, a local white judge praised Walker as not only "an eminent Gloucestorian but an eminent Virginian," whose influence in the African American community "extended far beyond the borders of our beloved state." Walker's autobiography was published posthumously in 1958 as The Honey-Pod Tree: The Life Story of Thomas Calhoun Walker. The title referred to a honey locust (or honey-pod) tree in Gloucester County that provided shade at the slave auction block and in subsequent years was the place where African Americans gathered to read the Emancipation Proclamation. Walker left a substantial estate of $44,000, including his home, which was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. A state historic marker had been erected nearby in 1986. The Virginia General Assembly in 2019 passed a joint resolution honoring Walker for his work as an attorney, educator, and civic leader singularly dedicated to Gloucester County.
Sources Consulted:
Thomas Calhoun Walker, The Honey-Pod Tree: The Life Story of Thomas Calhoun Walker (1958), frontispiece portrait, esp. 6 (with incorrect 9 Nov. 1953 death date), 11 (birth date), 211 (first quotation), 264 (seventh quotation), 271 (sixth quotation); Thomas Calhoun Walker Manuscript, (ca. 1950), 187 (second quotation), 231 (third quotation), Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg; variant birth year of 1861 on gravestone, Bethel Baptist Church cemetery, Gloucester Co., and in Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Twenty-Two Years' Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton Virginia (1893), 199–200 (fifth quotation); first marriage in Massachusetts Vital Records, Marriages, 1841–1895, City of Chelsea, Suffolk, vol. 399 (1889), Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Boston; second marriage in Marriage Register, Elizabeth City County (1914), Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Gloucester Co. Minute Book, 7:84, Gloucester Co. Deed Books, 13:98–99, 310, 15:85, 16:247–250; 17:108–109; Public Welfare 14 (May 1936): 4; numerous references in Southern Workman, incl. 50 (1921): 532 and 55 (1926): 500–508; Richmond News Leader, 29 Apr. 1936 (fourth quotation); Norfolk Journal and Guide, 5 Jan. 1935, 21 May 1938, 12 Aug. 1939, 1 May 1954 (eighth quotation); feature article in Washington Post, 26 Feb. 1984 (with incorrect 9 Nov. 1953 death date); Virginia State Corporation Commission Charter Books, 13:381–382, 28:332–334, Record Group 112, State Government Records Collection, LVA; Death Certificate (with erroneous month of October), Gloucester County, BVS; obituaries, memorials, and funeral accounts in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 Nov. 1953, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 7 Nov. 1953; Baltimore Afro-American, 14, 21 Nov. 1953, Norfolk Journal and Guide, 14, 21 (with estate account) Nov. 1953, Philadelphia Tribune, 17 Nov. 1953, and Virginia Education Bulletin 33 (Jan.–Feb. 1954): 76 (portrait).
Frontispiece photograph in Thomas Calhoun Walker Manuscript (ca. 1950), Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John G. Deal.
How to cite this page:
John G. Deal, "Thomas Calhoun Walker (1862–1953)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Walker_Thomas_Calhoun, accessed [today's date]).
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