Kenneth Walker, 73, journalist who bared the brutality of apartheid

Kenneth Walker, an Emmy Award-winning journalist whose reporting for the ABC news program “Nightline” helped bring the brutality of the racist apartheid system of South Africa to the attention of the American public and to drive it to the agenda of the American policy makers, died in Washon. He was 73.

His cousin and performer, Jeff Brown, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by a heart attack, it was not reported on a large scale at the time.

The weekly reporting of Mr Walker about the often brutal policy of racial segregation of South Africa – produced for “Nightline” with TED Koppel, the anchor of the program and a team of reporters – won an Emmy Award from 1985 of the National Academy Arts and Sciences for an protruding rare. It also received an Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Gold Baton.

“In the way in which only television is possible, ‘nightline’ revealed the pain, fear and anger that is sufficient for viewers that the struggles of this divided country are sufficient,” said the Dupont-Columbia Citation. “Masterly executed and beautifully produced, it was perhaps the most powerful, especially the most extraordinary television of the year.”

The National Association of Black Journalists called Mr. Walker Journalist of the Year in 1985 for that report. The association had already given him a prize for his work in the print journalism-for his four-part series about Apartheid for the Washington Star-EN when he won the top price of the Association for Radio Journalism in 2001, he became the first person to receive his highest awards for Print, Television and Radio.

The association honored him later, with his Frederick Douglass Lifetime Achievement Award.

During his four decades career, Mr. Walker was a reporter for the Washington Star (from 1969 to 1981, when it folded), for “Nightline” (from 1981 to 1988) and for NPR, where he served as Africa Bureau Chief from 1999 to 2002.

Mr. Koppel remembered in an interview that Mr Walker ‘one of a number of Afro -American staff members was at’ Nightline ‘who were soft and not so soft, insisted that more attention was paid to Nelson Mandela when he was still in prison and was anything but a held for millions of people, including the president of the Union of the Union of the Union).

Mr. Walker helped to persuade ABC leaders to spend around $ 1 million to send the production of ‘Nightline’ to South Africa for a few weeks, said Mr Koppel: ‘His estate is that he had an important role to help us convince us to do something.

But Mr. Walker did not limit his criticism to other countries. He was also pronounced about racism in America and the special responsibility of black journalists.

In 2021, at the annual round table of Richard Prince, the former Washington Post reporter and editor who writes the online column Magazine minusesMr Walker described the United States as an “active place crime” that justified an investigation by the United Nations into crimes against humanity because of numerous racist incidents that “ignore the media, including the most black journalists.”

He preferred recovery for slavery and criticized the negative representation of black people on television and in popular music.

He also regretted the scarcity of black reporters; He wrote that in a Facebook message from 2022 Racist recruitment practices Had “made it impossible for the media to keep the audience informed.”

Kenneth Reginald Walker was born on August 17, 1951 in Washington. His father, William, was a cabriver; His mother, Lillie, was a government clerk.

After graduating from the Archbishop Carroll High School in 1969, he worked at Washington Star as a copy boy while he went to the Catholic University of America at a fair. He left school before graduating to maintain his growing family and became a reporter at De Ster.

Mr. Walker is survived by two step sisters, Tabia Berry and Vikki Walker Parson and three grandchildren. His marriages to Jacquelyn Demesme and Ra’esah Moon ended in divorce. A daughter from his first marriage, Maisha Hunter, died in 2017.

As a reporter for the star, Mr. Walker covered the White House and the Supreme Court and also served as a national and foreign correspondent.

While he was still at the star, he started working in TV, as a host of a weekend public affairs show at the ABC branch in Baltimore, aimed at issues of particular importance for black viewers. After the star was folded in 1981, he was hired at ABC as a general allocation reporter. He continued with the White House and the Ministry of Justice for the network.

When “60 minutes” broadcast a segment about apartheid in December 1984, Mr. Walker ABC also contributed to also cover racial segregation in South Africa. (The “Nightline” team that eventually won an Emmy for that cover included the executive producer, Richard Kaplan; three senior producers, William Moore, Robert Jordan and Betsy West; and two reporters, Mr. Walker and Jeff Greenfield.)

“Blacks in the US wrote and called ABC and the other networks massively, something that does not happen very often,” Mr Walker was quoted in “Black Journalists: The Nabj Story” (1997), by Wayne Dawkins. “Black South African resistance had also escalated to the point where it could no longer be ignored.”

Mr. Walker later anchored briefly anchored “USA Today: The Television Series”; produced ‘The Jesse Jackson Show’, a syndicated talk show that was broadcast in 1990 and 1991; and founded Lion House Publishing, whose books “Black American Witness: Reports from the Front” (1994) were from Earl Caldwell, a former reporter for the New York Times.

After leaving NPR, Mr. Walker remained in South Africa, where he served as a communication director for the Humanitarian Organization Care.

He returned to Washington in 2015, who needed a kidney transplant. A secondary school classmate, Charlie Ball, with whom he connected through an alumni group, proved a competition and gave a kidney.

“The gift of Charlie has also been a gift in spirit as one of life,” Mr. Walker said in 2019. “As a member of the last generation of the civil rights movement, I spent my life in the front line of America’s constant struggle with his formerly slaved civilians. Sometimes it is won.