95-Year-Old ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Actor Bill Walker Talks Fighting Racism in Hollywood in Unearthed Interview
Phylicia Rashad, Bill Walker, Mario & Melvin Van Peebles, Djimon Hounsou and James Avery interviewed for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Legacy Collection.
The SAG-AFTRA Foundation kicked off Black History Month by launching the fourth season of its Legacy Collection, a series of more than 200 never-before-seen career retrospective interviews.
This season focuses on trailblazing Black film and TV actors — beginning with the late Bill Walker, whose career spanned nearly 50 years and more than 100 films and TV shows, including “The Killers,” “The Long Hot Summer” and “Our Man Flint.” Remember Reverend Sykes, who urges Scout a.k.a. Jean Louise to “stand up, your father’s passin’” as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom near the end of “To Kill a Mockingbird”? That’s Walker in action.
The veteran actor, who also served on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild from 1952 to 1971 (only the third Black person to do so), was interviewed about his life and career just seven weeks before he died in January 1992. Then 95 years old, Walker candidly recounts his journey from small town Indiana (where he was the only Black student to graduate from an all-white high school) to acting on Hollywood’s silver screens and fighting for better representation for Black actors.
Popular on VarietyIn the hour-long interview, Walker discusses his career highlights — including working on 1950’s “Bright Leaf” with Gary Cooper, who Walker called “the finest man I ever shook hands with” — and lowlights — like the time he was accused of being a Communist at a SAG board meeting.
Walker also shared words of wisdom from his grandmother, who had been a slave, which he learned to live by. “There’s fear and greed and all that out there, but don’t you go around in the world with your fist all balled up, because then can’t no goodness get in,” Walker’s grandmother, who had been a slave, told him when he graduated high school. “That’s the message I’d like to leave with the world: ‘Unball your fists,’” he said.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Variety covered Walker’s career, with early mentions in cast listings and for movies like “No Way Out” (with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis) and “The Harlem Globetrotters” (with Dorothy Dandridge). His first headline mention came in 1952, when he landed a featured role in “Mississippi Gambler.”
Walker’s obituary was published in the Jan. 28 edition of Daily Variety and included was a recounting of the events of May 7, 1953, when he delivered a speech to urging Hollywood producers to hire more Black actors and to more fairly represent Black people on screen.
With fellow SAG board member Ronald Reagan at his side, Walker spoke on behalf of the union who had “decided it was time to stop talking and to act to correct certain conditions” and advocated for “immediate action” on the matter, namely that Black actors be “cast in a wider variety of roles than the usual butler and maid role allotted them, including ‘non-specifically Negro roles,’” that they be cast in all crowd and background scenes and, finally, the “proper portrayal of the role of Negroes in American history.”
At the meeting, Walker told producers: “No person, no race, can walk alone successfully. Don’t take away the jobs the Negro now has in pictures. But give him more job opportunities so that we may join with you in the march toward better pictures, more honest pictures and bigger box office.”
As the obituary notes (and the SAG-AFTRA Foundation conversation affirms), Walker waged his fight for inclusion and fairness for the rest of his life.
The Black History Month-timed season of the Legacy Collection is a six-week series consisting of 12 episodes, released on the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s YouTube channel every Monday and Thursday. Interviews with Walker, Janet MacLachlan and James Avery are currently available, with Phylicia Rashad’s interview set to debut on Thurs. Feb. 6.
The remaining interviews will be released as follows:Mon., Feb. 10: Eriq La Salle (filmed 5/8/2003)Thurs., Feb. 13: Derek Luke (filmed 11/27/2006)Mon., Feb. 17: Andre Braugher (filmed 1/15/2002)Thurs., Feb. 20: Lorraine Toussaint (filmed 12/16/2012)Mon., Feb. 24: Djimon Hounsou (filmed 1/8/2004)Thurs., Feb. 27: Sophie Okonedo (filmed 1/12/2005)Mon., Mar. 3: Blair Underwood (filmed 6/3/2008)Thurs., Mar. 6: Mario & Melvin Van Peebles (filmed 4/7/2004)
The Legacy Collection launched in 2024 as an expansion on the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s ongoing “Conversations” series, which features in-depth discussions and career retrospectives with acclaimed actors. The program dates back more than 40 years when the inaugural episode with actor Henry Fonda was recorded (on Dec. 15, 1979), but many of those talks were unavailable until last year.
“Ten years ago, we embarked upon a major project to preserve, digitize and back up this collection, which for 35 years prior, were recorded on a variety of different formats,”. “So, in 2014, we started the process of digitizing these older conversations,” Rochelle Rose, SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s national director of performers programs, told Variety’s Jenelle Riley at the launch. “To quote Helen Mirren, ‘It’s only here [at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation] that you have a true history of acting — it’s through these conversations.’”
The first season, “Emmy Winners,” featured episodes with Robert Duvall, Viola Davis, Henry Winkler, Jessica Walter, Peter Dinklage, Doris Roberts, S. Epatha Merkerson, William Shatner, Edie Falco, Edward James Olmos, Jean Smart and Alfre Woodard.
The second season, “Icons,” included conversations with classic Hollywood legends like Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Charlton Heston, Ernest Borgnine, Ralph Bellamy, Rod Steiger, Dennis Hopper, Kathleen Freeman, Norman Lloyd, Tippi Hedren, Farrah Fawcett, Jane Russell and David Carradine.
The third season, “Oscar Winners,” featured Fonda, Forest Whitaker, Rita Moreno, Shirley MacLaine, Marlee Matlin, Michael Caine, Kathy Bates, Cliff Robertson, Mary Steenburgen, Ben Kingsley, Ellen Burstyn and Christopher Walken.
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