Phylicia Rashad, Bill Walker Among SAG-AFTRA Foundation Interviews

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.

In 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…