Walker, Margaret B.

By: Alferdteen Harrison

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Walker, Margaret B.

Sex:  Female

Born:  Birmingham, Alabama, United States
7 July 1915

Died:  Chicago, Illinois, United States
30 November 1998

Activity/Profession:  Poet, Fiction Writer

(b. 7 July 1915; d. 30 November 1998),
poet, author, professor, and civil rights activist.

Margaret Abigail Walker (Alexander) was one of the most gifted poetic voices of the twentieth century. In the preface to her last book of poetry, This Is My Century, Walker wrote, “If I could write my epitaph it would read: Here lies Margaret Walker/Poet and Dreamer/She tried to make her life a Poem.”

Walker's life was a poem saturated with love, dreams, play, blunders, laughter, pain hopes, desires, and work. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to educated and professionally successful parents. Later, the family moved to Meridian, Mississippi, for a few years, then to New Orleans, Louisiana, where both parents taught at New Orleans College (now Dillard University) for twenty years. Her Jamaican father, Sigismund C. Walker, was a Methodist minister who graduated from the Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta and from Northwestern University in Illinois. Her mother, Marion Dozier Walker, was a music teacher and orchestra director who graduated from Dillard.

Walker had two younger sisters and one younger brother who followed their mother in musical careers. She was a child prodigy who could read and write at the age of three or four. Her greatest mentor was her father, who encouraged her to write poetry in a date book that he had given her. When that book was filled, Margaret continued a lifetime of regular writing in her diary. She went to the laboratory school and two years of college at Dillard.

Margaret Walker was an author, professor, civil rights activist, and gifted poet. In the preface to her last book of poetry, she wrote, “If I could write my epitaph it would read: Here lies Margaret Walker/Poet and Dreamer/She tried to make her life a Poem.”

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

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As she grew up in the segregated South, her formative years included experiences such as the Jim Crow laws forbidding her attendance at Tulane University, even though a maid could take her poetry to a literature professor for his comments. In addition, in New Orleans, Walker was exposed to the spirit of the New Negro movement, or Harlem Renaissance, that uplifted the peculiar cultural experiences of African Americans. She read the works of the Harlem Renaissance authors and was nurtured by them. At age seventeen she expressed a similar concern for the race in her first published essay “What Is to Become of Us,” published in Our Youth, a 1932 New Orleans magazine. While in the South she met Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and received encouragement from persons like Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, who traveled to the black community and spoke at its churches and colleges. Through a mentor relationship when she was nineteen years old, Walker shared her poetry with Du Bois, who published her first poem, “Daydream” (also known as “I Want to Write”), in Crisis magazine in 1934.

Walker's poetry, essays, novel, and other writings are generally descriptive of life as she observed it in the African American community. This is exemplified in her signature poem, “For My People” (1937), and the collected book of poetry by the same title. With the publication of her book For My People by Yale University Press in 1942, Walker became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry during the “Chicago Renaissance” and the most significant African American woman poet since the poets published in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1960s the poem, “For My People” had become increasingly popular among the masses in the African American community and in many civil rights movement circles. Among African American activists and students, the poem was recited because it expressed the best poetic reason why they were in the “struggle.” Many civil rights workers knew the poem “For My People” in the 1960s before knowing the poet. In the 1970s, in addition to practicing her writing craft, Walker conducted summer seminars and lectured to teachers and scholars on how to study, appreciate, and celebrate African American culture.

Walker's novel Jubilee, a passionate Civil War story, won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1966. Jubilee quickly became a national best seller, selling more than a million copies by 1999, when a paperback edition was issued. The heroine in the novel, Vyry, was Walker's grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, who lived with her family and related the family oral tradition of slavery to Walker when she was very young.

While serving as the voice for her people, Walker remained accessible to her community. Scholars and writers enjoyed her southern cooking, especially her rice and gumbo and Christmas fruitcakes. She was a magnet for young writers. Often her home in Jackson, Mississippi, was the site of social and literary gatherings that created for some a sense of being a part of the literary movement for civil rights. Prophets for a New Day (1970) is a commemoration and salute to the civil rights movement activists like Medgar Evers and other African American leaders.

Another publication, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (1988), was the only critical biography of Richard Wright written by a published black scholar, and a person who had known Wright in the 1930s. The biography of Wright is a significant contribution to American literature. October Journey, published in 1973 by Broadside Press, is the only autobiographical work written by Walker.

Walker began her English teaching career in January 1942 at Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and in the fall of 1942, at West Virginia State College. She retired from Jackson State University (JSU) in 1979 and later became professor emeritus of English. Walker's career at Jackson State was distinguished by her work as a teacher of English literature and the Bible, the organizer of the first JSU literary conferences in 1952, and in 1968 the founder of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. To honor her, later the institute was renamed the Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center for the Study of the Twentieth-Century African American.

With the founding of this institute in 1968, Walker became a leader for the black studies movement. That was a significant departure for Walker's writing career. Focusing on the celebration of African American culture from 1968 to 1979, Alexander's creative energies increasingly went into sponsoring black studies summer institutes for teachers, developing black studies curricula, and the public presentation of black culture. The 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival assembled twenty-three black women who had published and initiated a new era for black women poets. Walker organized major black studies conferences including the conference on the city and one on Africa and African Affairs. The scheduling for these kinds of activities was often set with the help of the Farmers Almanac to select dates when the weather was expected to be good.

Among the women Walker mentored is Maryemma Graham, a former student she taught in 1969 while writer-in-residence at Northwestern. Graham collaborated with Walker on the publication of two books, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature and On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1938–1992. Since Walker's death, Graham has edited Fields Watered with Blood and Conversations with Margaret and, as of 2005, was writing the first biography on Walker.

Walker's writings have been recognized by numerous grants, awards, and other honors, including having a branch library named for her. In 1992, during the fiftieth anniversary celebration of her publishing career, the Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center sponsored a conference on “Black Women Writers of Magic Realism” and Roland Freeman's Margaret Walker's For My People: A Tribute, a book of photographs, was published. During the same time the Limited Editions Club in New York published the fiftieth anniversary edition of For My People with lithograph illustrations in color by Elizabeth Catlett.

Not only does Walker's writing reflect her social activism, but so does her service on local boards and appearances before state and national commissions. Further, in 1988 she was a member of the Hinds County Democratic caucus and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and an outspoken supporter of Jesse Jackson for U.S. president.

Walker lived a fulfilling life as wife, mother, and grandmother. She was married to Firnist James Alexander for thirty-seven years, and they had four children and nine grandchildren. The neighborhood where she lived for nearly fifty years in Jackson, Mississippi, is the Medgar Evers Historic District. She lived down the street from Evers (the civil rights leader, slain in 1963) on Guynes Street, now renamed in her honor.

Margaret Abigail Walker's legacy in the twentieth-century scholarly world is not only her published writings and her social activism but also her understanding of her people and her heritage. Because her ancestors attended black colleges, her parents taught at one for twenty years, and she taught at JSU for thirty years, she donated her literary papers to Jackson State University. In stating her intent to make the donation she said, “It is our hope that this will be the first, at a Historic Black College in the Gulf region …. I pray God's blessing on this endeavor and hope that it will enhance the future of Jackson State University and her sons and daughters everywhere.”

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