Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage; July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

Biography Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a teacher, and Marion (née Dozier) Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. She was captivated by the bedtime stories her grandmother told her, which were often tales of slavery. She knew at a young age that she wanted to become a writer so that she could write books about people of colour that would not make her feel ashamed. She attended school there, including several years of college at what is now Dillard University, before she moved north to Chicago. With the help of her English professor, E. B. Hungerford, who was also her mentor, Walker learned all the different forms of English poetry, the English metrical system, scansion of a poem, and memorised versification patterns. She was a member of the South Side Writers Group, which included authors such as Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, and Frank Marshall Davis.

In 1942, she received her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965, she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D.

Academic career Walker became a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University, an historically black college, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Center) and her personal papers are now stored there. Her For My People was considered the "most important collection of poetry written by a participant in the Chicago Black Renaissance before Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville." Richard Barksdale says: "The [title] poem was written when "world-wide pain, sorrow, and affliction were tangibly evident, and few could isolate the black man's dilemma from humanity's dilemma during the depression years or during the war years." He said that the power of resilience presented in the poem is a hope Walker holds out not only to black people but to all people, to "all the Adams and Eves."

Walker's second published book (and only novel), Jubilee (1966), is the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War, and is based on her great-grandmother's life.

This book is considered important in African-American literature. Walker was the first of a generation of women who started publishing more novels in the 1970s.

In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry 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.

Walker received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1989.

Court cases In 1978, Margaret Walker sued Alex Haley, claiming that his 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family had violated Jubilee s copyright by borrowing from her novel. The case was dismissed.

In 1991, Walker was sued by Ellen Wright, the widow of Richard Wright, on the grounds that Walker's use of unpublished letters and an unpublished journal in a just-published biography of Wright violated the widow's copyright. Wright v. Warner Books was dismissed by the district court, and this judgment was supported by the appeals court.

Death and legacy Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago, Illinois, in 1998, aged 83.

Walker was honoured with a historical marker through the Mississippi Writers Trail.

Works

Papers Galley sheets for Jubilee and original pre-corrected copy of A Poetic Equation at Millsaps-Wilson Library, Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi Margaret Walker Alexander Room and Collection, Jackson State University

Film biography For My People, The Life and Writing of Margaret Walker, distributed by California Newsreel.

Poetry and music Margaret Walker's evocative poetry has inspired new musical compositions by 20th and 21st-century composers. Inspired works include Randy Klein's 2011 For My People — The Margaret Walker Song Cycle, a song cycle for choir (formerly entitled Lineage), and Edward W. Hardy's 2022 BORN FREE, a song cycle for soprano, violin and piano.