Samuel Walker is the author of "Presidents and Civil Liberties From Wilson to Obama: A story of Poor Custodians" (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2012).

He is a widely quoted expert on issues of civil liberties, policing and criminal justice policy. He is the author of 14 books on those subjects, which have appeared in a combined total of 32 editions. He has been interviewed in every major media outlet in the United States and around the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS/Frontline, CNN and others.

Walker is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he taught from 1974 to 2005. He received a Ph.D. in American history from Ohio State University in 1973.

Walker is perhaps best known for his work on police accountability (including two books and two reports on “Driving While Female”) and for his definitive history of the American Civil Liberties Union, In Defense of American Liberties, which was first published in 1990 and issued in a revised edition in 2000 by Southern Illinois University Press. He is currently a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s National Working Group on Sexual Offenses by Police Officers.

Sam recently won the Western Society of Criminology’s W.E.B. Dubois Award for contributions to the field of criminology in the area of race and ethnicity. He will receive the award at the Society’s annual meeting in Vancouver in February 2011. Read the “Get to Know” profile in the Omaha World Herald regarding the award: gettoknow

His new book, Presidents and Civil Liberties From Wilson to Obama examines the civil liberties records of 17 presidents, beginning with Woodrow Wilson. The history of presidents and civil liberties is filled withsurprises and contradictions. Some of our most esteemed presidents were responsible for the worst violations of civil liberties. With the Japanese American internment, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only president who ever put Americans in concentration camps. Go to the section on “Civil Liberties History” on the home page of this web site for more information. The book is available through Amazon.

In his student days, Walker was an active participant in the civil rights movement. He was a volunteer in the historic Mississippi “Freedom Summer” in 1964 to help register black voters in the state. One of his fellow activists in a voter registration training session was Andrew Goodman, who, along with Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney, was murdered at the very beginning of the project summer by members of the Ku Klux Klan (with the complicity of local police).

An interview with Walker appeared in a 1964 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Sam has recently begun posting original documents from his experience in Mississippi on the Civil Rights Veterans web site. This also included the covers of 21 vinyl LPs of songs and interviews from the southern civil rights movement. Go to the web site: www.crmvet.org

In recognition of his scholarship and achievements, Walker has won numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including a $1 million Congressional grant for a Police Professionalism Initiative (1992-1995); fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute; the National ACLU Tribute to Civil Libertarians Award (2006); Faculty Member of the Year at the University of Omaha (2002); and the Distinguished Alumni award from his alma mater, Ohio State University (2001).

Walker is also an avid collector of items linked to history and music, two of his passions. He owns about 9,000 vinyl LPs of jazz, R&B and folk music, and has also amassed hundreds of original posters of presidents, civil rights, and various pop culture and political events. His collecting has now extended to sheet music, and he now has over 100 items from the World War I period and numerous presidential sheet music items. His posters on the civil rights movement – including several WW II-era government posters ordering Japanese residents into internment camps – were exhibited at the University of Nebraska at Omaha library in early 2010 in a show called Posters and Politics. An exhibit of jazz album covers, entitled “The Jazz Art of David Stone Martin,” was exhibited in the same gallery in April-May, 2011. View the announcement:

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Walker has been a resident of Omaha since 1973. He and his partner Mary Ann Lamanna marked 30 years together in September 2011 by spending a week in Paris. They attend movies and Bruce Springsteen concerts with a complete disregard for professional work schedules and budgets.

Show full bio

Hide full bio