Curriculum Vita
The Honorable Reverend Walter E. Fauntroy, pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. since 1959, has spent the past more than forty-six (46) years as a Christian minister, civil rights activist, member of congress and human rights activist, seeking to shape public policy that "declares Good News to the poor, that binds up the broken hearted and sets at liberty them that are bound" in the United States and around the world. A native of Washington, D.C. Mr. Fauntroy is a product of its public schools and a graduate of Virginia Union University (B.A. 1955) and Yale University Divinity School (B.D. 1958).
In the decade of the 1960's, as pastor New Bethel Baptist Church, he served as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s personal representative to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the leadership of the U.S. House and Senate, and the cabinet level agencies of the federal government that had relevance to the civil rights struggle at that time. As director of the Washington Bureau of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Mr. Fauntroy served as D.C. Coordinator of the Historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and coordinator of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March in 1965 as well as the Meredith Mississippi Freedom March in 1966. President Johnson appointed him Vice Chairman of the "White House Conference to Fulfill These Rights" in 1966 and Vice Chairman of the D.C. City Council in 1967. In the decade of the 60s he also founded and led the MICCO, a community planning and neighborhood development group in Washington, D.C. that established and began to implement the Shaw Urban Renewal Project.
In 1971, the Reverend Mr. Fauntroy was elected the first delegate to serve the citizens of the District of Columbia and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 100 years. In that post for the next twenty (20) years, he was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Chairman of the Caucus at the beginning of the Reagan Era in 1981 and author of the Black Leadership Family Plan For the Unity, Survival and Progress of Black People. On Thanksgiving Eve in 1984 he, with Randall Robinson and Dr. Mary Francis Berry, launched the Free South Africa Movement with their arrest at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. For twenty years a member of the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee, Congressman Fauntroy served as chair of the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy for six (6) years and chair of the Subcommittee on International Development, Finance, Trade and Monetary Policy for four (4) years. He also served as chair of the Bipartisan/Bicameral Task Force on Haiti for fifteen (15) years.
He is president of the National Black Leadership Roundtable (NBLR), the national network vehicle of the Congressional Black Caucus that he founded in 1977. In that capacity, as a part of the NBLR’s Seven Point Program, he is Co-chair of the Sudan Campaign, chairman of the Business Enterprise Development, LLC and currently heads up a U.S. based private sector effort to cure extreme poverty in Africa by the year 2025 in pursuit of the United Nations Millennium Challenge Goals. The drive is undertaken by the Roundtable in partnership with the Zimbabwe Progress Fund (ZPF) and is known as the Millennium Villages Project. Its focus is upon villages in sub-Saharan Africa.
In recognition of his distinguished record of humanitarian service, both his alma maters, Virginia Union University and Yale University have conferred honorary Doctor of Law Degrees. He is married to the former Ms. Dorothy Simms of Petersburg, VA. They have two children: Marvin Keith and Melissa Alice.