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Sonny Rollins Lived to See Justice for His Wrongly Convicted Father

The jazz legend fought for nearly 80 years to clear his father of racially motivated charges.

In the wee hours of September 7, 2025, his 95th birthday, Sonny Rollins received news that felt like a dream: The secretary of the Navy had ordered his father’s wrongful 1946 court-martial conviction to be overturned. The jazz legend, who died on May 25, had been waiting eight decades for justice to be served. A draft of this article is one of the last things he read—a final coda to a life spent fighting injustice.

Walter William Rollins was a decorated naval steward who had served generals, presidents, and members of Congress. He was arrested 80 years ago this past February on charges of committing adultery, violating a taboo of interracial romance with a white woman. For this and other unproven charges, ranging from “scandalous conduct” to embezzlement, he faced up to 180 years in a naval prison.

In his 26 years of service to the Navy, Walter Rollins had maintained a spotless record. He had risen to the rank of chief steward at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, the highest a Black service member could attain at the time. The armed services remained segregated until 1948. There was no material evidence of any wrongdoing, and both the woman in question and her husband vehemently denied the allegations. Adm. Arthur W. Radford, a close friend of Walter Rollins who would soon become the second chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, served as a character witness. However, congressional pressure and an all-white court-martial in Jim Crow Maryland meant that injustice prevailed.

Sonny celebrated his 16th birthday by going with his family to say goodbye to his father before the start of his two-year prison sentence.

“It was like being lynched,” Rollins recalled recently, speaking of his father’s ordeal. The posthumous exoneration marked a stunning reversal. “You don’t hear stories like this, because they don’t happen,” he said. “This happened.”

And yet, for decades, Rollins pretended that this legal lynching never happened. “I had sort of eliminated what happened to him from my mind,” he said. “It was a terrible thing to go through, and so I had to get away from having to think about that the rest of my life.”

I discovered this buried family secret while doing research for Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, the biography I published in 2022. There was no mention of this traumatic chapter in Rollins’s life in his voluminous archive at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, nor in the thousands of interviews with Rollins. Terri Hinte, his publicist of 50 years, had never heard about it.

After the story of Walter Rollins’s arrest broke, though, it........

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