The year was 1953, when a Black teenager should have been celebrating one of the greatest days of his life. But while a Dallas prosecutor was busy painting the Black teen as a cold-blooded killer, he was in a hospital room, welcoming his newborn son into the world at the exact moment a white store clerk was being murdered across town. He was a father for only a few months before the state of Texas decided he was a predator who deserved to die.
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Tommy Lee Walker, a 19-year-old Black man in Dallas, was at Baylor Hospital awaiting the arrival of his first and only child with his girlfriend Mary Louise Smith on September 30, 1953.
At that exact moment three miles away near Love Field Airport, a white woman named Venice Lorraine Parker was being sexually assaulted and stabbed while waiting for the bus after her shift at a nearby toy store.
Parker had been unable to speak because her throat had been slit, according to the Innocence Project. Two individuals, who admitted they didn’t witness the actual crime, told authorities they saw Walker in the area that night, and the officer who interviewed Parker alleged she identified the assailant as a Black man. The 31-year-old died from her injuries.
Despite the physical impossibility of Walker being in two places at once, he was arrested four months later by an alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan, Dallas Police Homicide Bureau Chief Will Fritz, according to the Innocence Project. In the Jim Crow South, the word of a Black man was often treated as invisible when the victim was a white woman.
Walker, alone and in a room of white officers, was subjected to hours of “intense questioning” during his detainment. He was told that if he didn’t sign a confession, he would be sent to the electric chair. They used the threat of death to extract a signature.
Ironically, that signature became the very tool used to kill him. Despite the lack of physical evidence and the overwhelming testimony of 10 eyewitnesses who saw him at the hospital, Walker was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury.
At the age of 21, he was executed by electric chair in Texas on May 12, 1956. He used his last words to proclaim his innocence.
“I feel that I have been tricked out of my life,” Walker said. “There’s a lot of other people who have been convicted for crimes they committed and was turned loose. I haven’t did anything, and I’m not being turned loose.”
Now, 70 years after the state took his life in a cloud of smoke and state-sanctioned lies, Dallas is finally admitting what the Walker family has known for seven decades: They murdered an innocent man.
On Jan. 21, Dallas County officials formally exonerated Walker in a historic resolution, acknowledging that “Mr. Walker’s arrest, interrogation, prosecution and conviction were fundamentally compromised by false or unreliable evidence, coercive interrogation tactics, and racial bias,” which represented “egregious violations of Mr. Walker’s constitutional rights.”
Walker’s only son, Ted Smith of Dallas, wept while addressing commissioners. “I’m 72 years old and I still miss my daddy,” he said. “Because my mother said, she told me— this had to be pounded in my head each and every time, and it even drove her to drinking heavily— she said, ‘Baby, they gave your father the electric chair for something he didn’t do.’”
Ted added how it was “hard growing up without a father. When I was in school, kids talked about their dads, and I had nothing to say.” He acknowledged his father’s exoneration “won’t bring him back, but now the world knows what we always knew— that he was an innocent man. And that brings some peace.”
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