Walker, Gwendolyn K.

Gwendolyn K. Walker was born August 11, 1956 in Houston, Texas. She arrived in North Las Vegas, Nevada in 1962 as a five-year-old with her parents, two brothers, and her cousins. The Walker family at first moved to a rented house on D Street, and she attended Kit Carson Elementary School for first grade. Her mother enrolled in nursing school, so she sent Walker back to Delhi, Louisiana, to be raised by her grandmother. In Delhi, she picked cotton with her aunt while she was in the second grade. Walker returned to North Las Vegas to live with her mother and complete elementary school at Jo Mackey before attending J. D. Smith Elementary School for junior high school and then to Clark High School. Later, she attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Walker and her mother joined Saint James Catholic Church at H Street and Washington Avenue, but after she returned from Delhi she joined Second Baptist Church, where she became close with a cohort of friends that remained strong even as she experienced racism and bullying and love for the first time. Walker was still in junior high school when her mother founded S.W.A.P. (Students With A Purpose) and the Swapettes drill team, the first precision drill team in Las Vegas, to keep youth busy with positive activities such as craft and cooking classes and the drill team. This also was the time she began to collect African American memorabilia.

Collecting African American items became a passion for her. Her African American collections became the foundation for the Walker African American Museum. Also, the family is related to African American blues guitarist T-Bone Walker and Moses Fleetwood Walker, who was the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball (sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson).