1. Lester Aglar Walton was a St Louis-born Harlem Renaissance polymath and intellectual, a well-known figure in his day, who advanced civil rights in significant and prescient ways in journalism, entertainment, politics, diplomacy and elsewhere.
10 Facts About Lester Walton
1. 2.
Lester Walton went on to become an advocate of another kind when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him US Ambassador to Liberia in 1935.
3.
In film, Lester Walton used his platform to take a moral stand against lynching imagery and the related objectification of Black bodies in the burgeoning film industry.
4.
Lester Walton was one of the first African Americans to work for the Democratic National Committee.
5.
Intermittently, from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Lester Walton was an active democrat who served as director of publicity in the Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee.
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Lester Walton visited the country in 1933, and published articles on the country for the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune.
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Lester Walton negotiated with the Liberian government for the construction of a port in Monrovia and concluded commerce, navigation and aviation treaties.
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In 1953, Lester Walton founded the Coordinating Council of Colored Performers to advocate for three-dimensional, rather than stereotyped depictions of Black characters.
9.
On June 29,1912, Walton married Gladys Moore, daughter of Fred A Moore, publisher of the New York Age.
10.
In 1965, Lester Walton died at age 84 in Harlem's Sydenham Hospital.