Lifetime Achievement: An individual who has dedicated their life to the arts and achieved distinction within the community. The award recognizes an individual artist, arts manager, advocate or other who has strengthened arts and culture in the community through decades of service.
Walter K. Delbridge
Walter K. Delbridge is a lifelong poet, writer, and performer who stands as a testament to the power of art to heal and connect.
Born in Birmingham in 1946 to Catherine Dancy and Jem Delbridge, Walter moved to Akron at age eleven after a childhood spent exploring the woods and swamps of Alabama. In Akron, he swiftly distinguished himself as a promising young leader. He was voted class president of Miller South and of Garfield High (class of 1965), where he welcomed First Lady Ladybird Johnson to Akron. Civil rights leader Vernon Odum took Walter under his wing, encouraging him to attend Morehouse College, Odum’s and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater. Walter enrolled on scholarship and excelled as editor-in-chief of the Morehouse Tiger, class president, and lead actor in the Morehouse-Spelman Players, with his classmate Samuel L. Jackson in the audience.
A rising star in the art scene, Walter began writing poetry and attended Harvard and Yale summer programs on a Ford Foundation scholarship. He met James Baldwin, and as National Urban League Youth president, he was invited to the White House with Whitney Young. Walter had just received a Charles Merrill scholarship to study overseas when the news came in that Dr. King had been assassinated. On the steps of Morehouse College, he gave a speech urging students to uphold Dr. King’s legacy of non-violence. In the following days, he led a march through the streets of Atlanta and served as an usher at Dr. King’s funeral. Caught up in the turbulence of the movement while attempting to support his family back home, Walter dropped out of school and was drafted by the army.
Faced with an intelligent, influential young Black leader, the Army psychiatrist diagnosed Walter with paranoid schizophrenia, and he was sent back to Akron to be institutionalized. At the same time, his poetry was published alongside Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde in the prominent anthologies Understanding the New Black Poetry and We Speak As Liberators. After emerging from Fallsview Psychiatric, Walter changed his name from Dancy to Delbridge and quietly completed a B.A. in English at the University of Akron, teaching graduate courses until the tragic murder of his brother Willie sent him back into the clutches of a byzantine mental healthcare system. Walter continued to write poetry during this time to “steel his mind” against heavy medication and stigma. In 1979, while listening to Coltrane and Mingus, he wrote 122 poems in just 24 hours, a collection he titled Isolation and Intellect.
In 2004, following a chance meeting, Walter gave his manuscripts to an Akron songwriter who set about digitizing his work, bringing it to the attention of the literary scene after decades of obscurity. His long-overdue renaissance began in 2017 with publication by Oxford University Press and a triumphant return to the stage at the Rubber City Jazz and Blues Festival. He later performed at Art of Recovery in Akron’s historic Greystone Hall and joined Theron Brown for his record release performance at E.J. Thomas Hall. Meanwhile, scholars at Vanderbilt University were uncovering the history his diagnosis had erased—his early publications, national awards, and lost legacy. In 2022, the University of Akron Press published Comeback Evolution: Selected Works of Walter K. Delbridge, celebrated with a book signing and performance at E.J. Thomas Hall in collaboration with Theron Brown, Floco Torres, and Kate Tucker.
Now living in an assisted care home, surrounded by his beloved books, Walter K. Delbridge continues to write while devouring tracts of philosophy, art, and spirituality. He assures us, “The body is aging, while the mind and spirit brighten.” Honored with the Arts Alive Lifetime Achievement Award, he hopes to inspire young artists to persist through adversity and find their own clarion voice.
