BRIDGEWATER, Mass. — Before he taught English at a Massachusetts college, before he completed two terminal degrees at the University of Iowa, before he took courses at a local community college, Dr. Jerald Walker was a drug-abusing dropout running the streets of Chicago, committing petty crimes.
His five years living an urban nightmare ended right after a drug-dealing friend who had just sold him cocaine was fatally shot in another deal at the same place. The close call got his attention but he says that was not what turned his life around.
“I think it was the values instilled in me by my parents,” says Walker, an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College. “They never left me. They were just buried.” Those values, taught by his blind parents, are simple enough: hard work, honesty, decency, respect for self and others.
“My dad was a hard-working man. He often had two jobs — blind,” Walker recalls.
Those values may be why Walker never reached the worst depths of street life. He kept a job, avoided prison time, backed out of a gang and refused to engage in gunplay.
His ascent from the street to academia is chronicled in his new book, Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption.
Walker came to Bridgewater State in 2002, a year after the public college in southeastern Massachusetts hired his wife on its faculty. He was tenured in 2008 and promoted to associate professor last year. His colleagues didn’t know about his criminal past.
