Foreground, from left: Ngozi Onunaku ’01, Alexandra Calixte ’01, Stacey Thompson ’99, and Walters. Photograph: Frank Curran

For more than 25 years, Hubert Walters has directed Boston College’s Voices of Imani gospel choir (imani means “faith,” in Swahili) and served as a lecturer in music and African and African diaspora studies. On April 11, before a packed house at Trinity Chapel on the Newton Campus, the man whom students and alumni call simply “Professor” led a farewell concert in advance of his retirement this summer. The event was vintage Walters.

Whether he was explaining the provenance of the South African national anthem (a blending of an Afrikaans anthem with a Methodist hymn composed in Xhosa) or recounting the story of the pioneering Fisk Jubilee Singers—young men and women from Fisk University

in Nashville, Tennessee, who, from 1871, popularized African-American spirituals and slave songs—Walters made certain the audience felt the historic force of the music. “[In class] Professor explained to us why ‘Wade in the Water’ was so important during slavery times, why ‘Turn Me Around’ was so important during the civil rights movement. Then he taught us the actual songs,” said Candace Ashir ’00, a former member of Voices of Imani who traveled from Memphis, Tennessee, for the concert.

Walters came of age as the civil rights movement gained momentum, growing up in Greenville, North Carolina. He attended historically black North Carolina Central University and graduated in 1955, then entered the U.S. Army, serving as a chaplain’s assistant. He later became one of the first African-Americans to enroll at East Carolina University, in Greenville, and the first to receive a degree—his master’s—from the school of music, in 1965. Walters spent the next three years in the music department at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, as an assistant professor and as the director of the Shaw University Choir.

In 1969, a Martin Luther King, Jr., Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation took him to Boston University, for further study. While there, he was invited to teach the history of black music at Harvard University and became the first director of Harvard’s Kuumba Singers. Although he led the group for only a year, the Kuumba Singers, whose name derives from the Swahili word for “creativity,” live on, and the current ensemble shared the stage with Voices of Imani for Walters’s farewell concert. “All that we do stems from the seeds [Walters] planted in 1970,” said Sheldon Reid, Kuumba’s current director, before his choir sang.

The concert started with a thumping drum and bass overture as the Voices of Imani, some 50 students clad in light blue dress shirts and black slacks, entered from the back of the church. Walters sat with the audience, in the front row, as Elan Trotman, his assistant, conducted the first four songs. “If you want to get up, clap your hands, stomp your feet, you’re more than welcome to,” Trotman told the audience. And they did, with clusters of Imani alumni and friends often joining in the chorus as the choir performed traditional spirituals and contemporary gospel songs.

When Walters took the stage, it was with the New Fisk Jubilee Singers, a subset within Voices of Imani. Over shouts and applause he set right to directing, the smile never leaving his face. The music he led tended toward slower, more solemn pieces, and after each, he stepped to the side of the stage to let his choir soak in the applause, before he spoke. Walters didn’t talk about his time at Boston College coming to a close; rather, he drove home, one last time, why the music was important. Others, including Trotman and Reid and Rev. Howard McClendon of Campus Ministry, took the microphone between numbers to shine the spotlight on Walters and his career. Each time, the audience responded with cheers and a standing ovation for the director.

For the final song of the concert, Walters invited former Voices of Imani members in the audience to join in singing the soaring “This Day,” as arranged by him in 1995 after the death of Amanda Houston, Boston College’s longtime black studies director who brought Walters to the University in 1982. About a fifth of the audience strode to the front of the church and found places alongside the current choir, and when they sang all swayed as one with the familiar tune. (“Lord we need your joy this day. Thank you for this day.”) Afterward, Ashir and other Imani alumni from the 1990s presented the beaming Walters with a plaque that read “Professor Walters—For the lives you’ve touched, hearts you’ve changed and the faith you’ve shared . . . thank you.”

“I tell Professor time and time again that he’s taught me more about myself than any classroom could,” said Brandon Jackson ’08, this year’s president of the Voices of Imani executive board, in an interview. During a post-concert reception, held at Alumni House, Jackson presented Walters with a scrapbook of letters, drawings, and notes from the choir’s current members. He was one of several students, faculty, and staff who took the podium before the elbow-to-elbow crowd to share recollections. Knowing laughter permeated the room when choir member Charisse Gilmer ’08 stood at the podium and invoked one of Walters’s fav­­orite lines of Scripture: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

After the appreciations and testimonials were done, the man himself spoke, for only a few minutes and mostly about his inspirations: the legendary tenor Roland Hayes, a son of slaves—who taught at Boston University before Walters’s arrival there—and his own mother and father, both of whom were singers.

Walters told a story about his mother: “I think I wanted to be a choral director ever since I was in elementary school,” he said, but “my mother told me, ‘You’re going to preach before it’s all over.’” Walters said he resisted the idea, because of his interest in music. “When she died, I went home and I said to my pastor, ‘Reverend, my mother never told me anything that didn’t come true, and she said I was going to be a preacher.’ And he said, ‘I know what that’s all about . . . but you don’t have to have a pulpit to preach.’ And I remembered that.”

Read more by Tim Czerwienski