Walton was a recent guest on Maine Public’s weekday call-in radio show Maine Calling. He spoke with host Cindy Han and took calls from listeners as he discussed the issues tackled in his latest book, (Godine, 2024).
The work is a collection of essays exploring race relations in the US between the civil rights era and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Walton cited Martin Luther King as an inspiration to many Black people, encouraged by King’s message that if they worked hard and tried to be like everyone else, they would fit in. This was the path Walton’s parents followed, he recalled. Both of them were from Mississippi, his father born on a cotton plantation. They escaped the racism of the South and moved to Illinois, where, through dedication and hard work, they ended up in a comfortable suburban existence.
This path for Black Americans, the story that Walton’s parents embodied, now seems under threat, he said. “I feel like the last eight to ten years have cast doubt upon whether that's true … and what it's going to take to make that ultimately possible for all African Americans—not just a few but all. Also,” he asked, “how do we handle these backlashes that seem to rise and at the moment seem very considerable and threatening?” .
Meanwhile, in a profile recently published in the Portland Press Herald, Walton explained how the phrase that inspired the title for the book—“End of Respectability”—came from a time during the first Trump administration when the future became more uncertain for many older Black citizens who had lived through segregation.
“It was based upon the idea that so many African Americans had worked hard to be a part of things in the United States, to fit in, to valiantly be good citizens—including serve, as my father did, in the Armed Forces—and whether or not that had been successful or useful became a question for me after the election of Donald Trump, and is even more so now,” he said.
“There was and is a great deal of disrespect and rage directed at us by MAGA, and further, there were… white citizens who also didn’t seem to care if African Americans were mocked and disparaged, even if they themselves did not directly engage in that sort of activity. It made me wonder if the MLK ‘content of your character’ approach had been misguided, a mistake, or had outlived its usefulness,” he added.
Walton said the result of the latest presidential race has confirmed that view for him and encouraged him to speak “more clearly and forcefully” about what’s important. .
