Margaret Abigail Walker (1915–98,) married name Margaret Alexander, was an American author, poet, and civil rights activist. She was part of the Chicago Black Renaissance, a mid-20th century African-American literary movement.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Walker graduated from Northwestern University and joined the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago. There she began a short literary relationship with novelist Richard Wright.
Walker attended the University of Iowa (M.A., 1940.) She wrote For My People (1942,) a critically acclaimed volume of poetry that celebrates black American culture. For My People won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Walker became the first black woman to receive the prestigious award.
Walker started teaching in the 1940s at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Her first novel, Jubilee (1966,) originally a PhD dissertation for the University of Iowa, is based on Walker’s maternal great-grandmother’s life. Jubilee chronicles the journey of a slave family from the mid-to-late-19th century. In How I Wrote Jubilee (1972,) Walker tracked her own story from her grandmother’s oral family history through extensive historical research.
Walker’s second volume of poetry, Prophets for a New Day (1970,) compares Biblical prophets and black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. October Journey (1973) consists of poems celebrating her heroes, including Harriet Tubman, Gwendolyn Brooks, and her father. After retiring from teaching in 1979, Walker published Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988) and a volume of poetry entitled This Is My Century (1989.)
Carolyn J. Brown wrote Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker (2014.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Margaret Walker
Keeping hatred inside makes you get mean and evil inside. And when you forgive you feel sorry for the one that hurt you; you return love for hate, and good for evil. And that stretches your heart and makes you bigger inside. Now when you hate you shrink up inside and get littler, and you squeeze your heart tight, and you stays so mad with peoples you feel sick all the time like you need the doctor. Folks with a loving heart don’t never need no doctor.
—Margaret Walker
Friends and good manners will carry you where money won’t go.
—Margaret Walker
Topics: Manners
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