Margaret Walker - (1915-1998)
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Houston High School in Houston, Mississippi
Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama. Walker thanked her mother for teaching her to read, while crediting her father with encouraging her to write. The Reverend Sigismund C. Walker, her father, was born in Jamaica Buff Bay, Jamaica and British West Indies. He came to the United States to study for the ministry, and he earned his degree from Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. Marion Dozier, a music teacher, and Walker's father fell in love at first sight. After they married, the couple moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where Walker and her three younger siblings were born. When she was ten years old, Walker and her family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana.
I. Upbringing, Education, and Professional Life
Sixteen-year-old Walker met Langston Hughes at New Orleans University where she was a sophomore and her parents were professors. After having read her work, Hughes was impressed, and he encouraged her to move to the North. Her first poem, called "Daydreaming" but later entitled "I Want to Write," appeared in Crisis magazine in 1934.
Walker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Northwestern University shortly after this first publication. In 1935, she joined the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago, a project that was designed to help promising writers. This gave Walker an opportunity to compare the sexually discriminative North and the racially discriminative South where she was raised. She completed her master's degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1942. This same year she became the first African American to be awarded the Yale Award for Young Poets for For My People . The following year, Walker married Firnist James Alexander, and to this union, four children were born: Marion Elizabeth, Firnist James, Jr., Sigismund Walker, and Margaret Elvira.
Walker began her career as an English professor at West Virginia State College, then at Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina. She spent twenty-six of the next thirty years teaching at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She founded and headed the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, later renamed the Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.
Walker had the responsibility of supporting a family that included a disabled husband. Unbelievably, she found time to research and compose early drafts of her famous novel, Jubilee. Walker received the Rosenwald Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1944, a Ford Fellowship at Yale University in 1954, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1965.
Margaret Walker's work connected the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and 1930's and the black art movement of the 1960's. Walker began writing professionally in the 1930's. She was still writing in 1997 when her health began to fail.
II. Literary Works
Only the second volume of American verse published by an African-American woman, For My People was the title poem that served as Walker's master's thesis. The entire poem, except the final strophe and stanza, was composed "by accident" in fifteen minutes. Walker was inspired by her father's moving sermons to write this book. It gives African Americans the needed strength to persevere and overcome the great oppression that was placed upon them. This book also explains the African American woman's place in black culture, while at the same time it details the large part the blacks' humility and trust have played in the economic oppression.
Based on her family's experience during slavery and following the Civil War, Jubilee was published in 1966. This is the story of Walker's great-grandmother Elvira Dozier, the daughter of a white slave owner and an African slave. Jubilee has sold millions of copies and has been printed in six languages including French, German, and Swedish. It has been made into an opera and has remained in print since its publication. Jubilee tells the story of Vyry, short for Elvira, from her birth into slavery until her death during Reconstruction. In 1988, Walker unsuccessfully sued Alex Haley, claiming that his book, Roots, disregarded her copyright for Jubilee.
Prophets for a New Day shows Walker's commitment to the civil rights movement. Published four years after Jubilee, this anthology compares civil rights leaders to biblical prophets, suggesting that their leadership combines politics and spirituality. This book inspires civil rights activists by using Jackson and Oxford, Mississippi, to gently unmask the racism in the Jim Crow South. Walker includes a section on John Brown, hung for attacking Harper's Ferry, to emphasize her belief that African Americans and whites can fight together for racial equality.
Published in 1979, October Journey is an assortment of autobiographical and occasional pieces. "I Want To Write," Walker's first poem, is considered the most memorable work in the entire book. The volume, which includes sonnets and ballads, was written to such famous people as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mary McLeod Bethune; and, a piece dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks is thought to be Walker's commitment to honoring legendary African Americans.
III. Works by Margaret Walker
Volumes
For My People (1942, poetry)
Jubilee (1966, novel)
Prophets for a New Day (1970, poetry)
How I Wrote Jubilee (1972, essay)
October Journey (1973, poetry)
A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974)
Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988, biography)
This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989)
Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990)
Essays
"New Poets" (1950, 1969)
"Black Writer's Views on Literary Lions and Values " (1968)
"Black Studies: Some Personal Observations" (1970)
"The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-American Literature" (1970)
"Religion, Poetry, and History: Foundations for a New Educational System" (1970)
"On Being Female, Black, and Free" (1980)
"Dr. Nick Aaron Ford: A Man in the Classic Tradition" (1984)
"Foreword" (1986)*
* In
I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, by Langston Hughes
IV. Margaret Walker on the Web
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/register/99/winter/r19.htmhttp://stallion.jsums.edu/~mwarc/walker.htm
http://shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/
V. Sources
African-American Writers
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/register/99/winter/r19.htm
This essay was submitted by a student of Beverly Doss, a teacher at Houston High School in Houston, Mississippi.