In May, Sheriff Attaway and his deputies, guns drawn and preparing for a riot, marched down South Valley Street into a black neighborhood where Mr. Wilson’s red brick church still stands. They went door to door, arresting and imprisoning around 40 people, some for days, most without charge.
Mr. Walker was never involved.
“I’d like to think I had something to do with it,” said Gary Jordan, a white man who coached Mr. Walker in track and field and football, starting when Mr. Walker was in fifth grade. “I said, ‘You can’t get fit by walking. You have to run. And the practice is at 3.”
Mr. Walker had several other white mentors in town, including a gas station owner where Mr. Walker worked and a farmer who had employed his parents. Another was a math teacher, Jeanette Caneega.
“As a student in school, her role in society was not to solve the racial problems of the world,” she said this summer.
“I don’t want to be divisive,” said Gary Phillips, the high school football coach of Mr. Walker, who is white, “but as an 18-year-old black kid in Wrightsville with a lot of pressure on him, can you see how or why he might have decided that it wasn’t the best thing for me to start doing?
Mr. Walker quickly left Wrightsville and rarely spoke about the episode. He declined to be interviewed for this article. At university, when asked about friction at home by a reporter, Mr Walker said he was “too young” and “didn’t want to get involved in anything that I didn’t know much.”
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In a memoir published decades later, Mr. Walker only briefly noted the conflict. But he described a school confrontation between a black student and the white principal the previous year.