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Maceo Walker, 85, a civil rights pioneer and banker who provided financial backing to help fund the dreams of thousands of black families and businessmen, died June 8 in Memphis, TN. Francis Hospital. He was an executive with Universal Life and Insurance and chairman of the board of that company and Tri-State Bank until his death, was one of the first blacks in modern times to be appointed to a city board. He was the son of the late Dr. Joseph Edison Walker and Lelia O’Neill Walker, born in 1909, in Indianola, Miss. At age 11, he moved with his family to Memphis, where his father started the Universal Life Insurance Co. in the 1920s. The business became one of the nation’s biggest life insurance companies. Walker was appointed to the Memphis Transit Authority board in July, 1961, by Mayor Henry Loeb. Ebony magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential Negroes in the United States in 1963. He had been active in the Negro Chamber of Commerce, the Abe Scharff YMCA, Memphis Urban League, the old Memphis Committee on Community Relations. He was a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. Walker attended LeMoyne High School, where he was a member of the football and baseball teams. He received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Fisk University in Nashville in 1930, and later earned a master’s degree in business from New York University, and a master’s in mathematics from the University of Michigan. Walker received an honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1959. As a student, Walker sold insurance during summer breaks. Later, he worked in the audit and other departments at Universal Life Insurance Co. He was named to the board of Universal Life in 1935, and became president of the company in 1952 when his father stepped down from that post. Walker helped his father organize the Tri-State Bank in 1946 and served as its vice president until he was elevated to president when his father was shot to death by an acquaintance. He married Harriette Ish, the daughter of a Little Rock surgeon, in 1938 and they were married until her death in 1989. The couple had three children, Lily Patricia Walker Shaw, who died in 1985, and Harriette Lucille ‘Candy’ Walker, who died in 1994, and Antonio Maceo Walker Jr who survived his father.