Walter Everette Hawkins

Walter Everette Hawkins (November 17, 1883 – unknown) was a poet, mail clerk, and freethinker, described as being 'an important figure in the transition of black literature from the genteel modes of the nineteenth century to the flowering of black militancy often identified with the Harlem Renaissance'. In 1936, now living in Brooklyn, New York, Hawkins published Petals from the Poppies. edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. One poem printed in The Messenger, an anti-lynching poem called 'The Mob Victim', was singled out in a 1919 report by the United States Department of Justice, used to prove that the magazine was 'particularly radical'.

In the preface to Petals from the Poppies (1936), he expressed his belief that 'since all Art is to a large extent propaganda', poetry should 'ally itself with the forces contending mightily for universal justice, freedom and peace; and against all those influence and institutions of evil, oppression and cruelty'.