Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker (full name Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander) was an American poet and writer born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, who died on November 30, 1998, in Chicago, Illinois. She belonged to the Chicago Black Renaissance, an African-American literary movement based in Chicago.

Her parents, Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker, were both teachers. They introduced her to philosophy and poetry as a child, and her grandmother’s bedtime stories about slavery sparked her early ambition to become a writer—she wanted to produce books about Black people that would not make her feel ashamed. When she was 15, she showed poems to Langston Hughes during a speaking tour, and he recognized her talent. Her family moved to New Orleans when she was young, and she attended college there at what is now Dillard University before heading north to Chicago. Under the mentorship of English professor E. B. Hungerford, she mastered English poetic forms, metrical systems, scansion, and versification patterns.

Walker earned a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University in 1935. The following year, she joined the Federal Writers' Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. There she worked alongside Gwendolyn Brooks and Frank Yerby. Her supervisor, Jacob Scher, was so impressed that he let her work from home on her own material—a privilege no other Illinois staff member received. She was also a member of the South Side Writers Group, which included Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, and Frank Marshall Davis.

In 1942, she earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and she returned there in 1965 to complete a Ph.D. She married Firnist Alexander in 1943 and moved to Mississippi, settling in the Medgar Evers Historic District (formerly Elraine Subdivision) in Jackson. They had four children.

From 1949 to 1979, Walker taught literature at what is now Jackson State University, a historically Black college. In 1968, she founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (later renamed the Margaret Walker Center), where her personal papers are now housed. She served as the institute’s director starting in 1976.

Her poetry collection *For My People* won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1942, judged by Stephen Vincent Benét, making her the first Black woman to receive a national writing prize. Critics considered it the most important poetry collection from the Chicago Black Renaissance before Gwendolyn Brooks’s *A Street in Bronzeville*. Richard Barksdale noted that the title poem was written during a time of worldwide pain and affliction, and that its message of resilience offered hope to all people, not just Black Americans.

Her only novel, *Jubilee* (1966), took thirty years to write and is based on her great-grandmother’s life, telling the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War. Roger Whitlow observed that it served as a strong counter to white “nostalgia” fiction about the antebellum and Reconstruction South. The novel is considered a landmark in African-American literature, and Walker was among the first of a generation of women who began publishing more novels in the 1970s.

In 1975, she released three poetry albums on Folkways Records: *Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes*; *Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes*; and *The Poetry of Margaret Walker*. She received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1989.

Walker was involved in two notable court cases. In 1978, she sued Alex Haley, claiming his 1976 novel *Roots: The Saga of an American Family* had infringed on *Jubilee*’s copyright; the case was dismissed. In 1991, she was sued by Ellen Wright, widow of Richard Wright, for using unpublished letters and a journal in a biography of Wright. The district court dismissed *Wright v. Warner Books*, and the appeals court upheld that decision.

Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago at age 83. She was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014 and honored with a historical marker through the Mississippi Writers Trail.

Her published works include *For My People* (1942), *Prophets for a New Day* (1970), *October Journey* (1973), *A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker* (1974), *Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work* (1988), *This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems* (1989), and *How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature* (1990, edited by Maryemma Graham).