Sam Walker is a nationally recognized expert on police accountability. His specific areas of expertise include citizen oversight of the police, early intervention systems to identify problem officers, federal pattern and practice litigation, and mediating citizen complaints. He is also an expert on the history of civil liberties, with books on the history of the ACLU and the controversy over hate speech. Read his full bio here.
The lyrics for These Rights Are Our Rights merge Sam’s interests in civil liberties and music. As a teenager in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, he listened to Top 40 radio and had albums by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Buddy Holly, and many others. For the last 35 years he has been collecting LPs (and some 78s) and now has about 10,000 in his record room.
The lyrics came about this way. When listening to radio stations on his headphones at the gym, Sam developed the habit of playing around with the lyrics, making a famous record funny, weird, off-color, or whatever. One day (but not at the gym) he heard Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, and immediately changed it to These Rights Are Our Rights. And that’s the story.
Sam is completely un-musical. He cannot sing, play an instrument (the teenage clarinet lessons failed), or read music. But he can play with words.
