white woman. If black people wanted to buy food
at many restaurants, they were not allowed to
enter through the front; they had to go around
to the back door. There were also signs on public
drinking fountains. Over one fountain might be
a sign reading ‘‘White,’’ while on another fountain
nearby would be a sign reading ‘‘Colored.’’ Though
Jim Crow laws existed predominantly in the South,
many northern restaurants, hotels, and schools
were also segregated.
African Americans began to be more vocal
about deserving civil rights after returning from
World War II. Many African American veterans
believed that they had earned equal rights after
fighting for the United States. The civil rights
movement began slowly in the 1950s when Afri-
can Americans staged sit-ins at local restaurants,
demanding to be served. Martin Luther King,
Jr., inspired large groups to protest nonviolently
to demand rights for all black citizens. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964, passed on July 2, at last
made most forms of discrimination unlawful;
yet it did not eliminate prejudice.
Critical Overview.
Walker is considered one of the first African
American writers and poets to portray what life
has been like for black women. She did so, many
reviewers state, without turning suffering into a
melodrama, or an overly dramatic statement. Yet
in her poems she does not glaze over the pain that
black women experienced growing up in slavery
and later in a segregated world; rather, she is
subtle about the suffering, concealing it within
her words. Her poems are noted for their vision,
their promise of what the future holds. Exempli-
fying the sentiments that many reviewers have
used to praise Walker’s writing are the words of
a literary award she received from the Feminist
Press. As quoted in Florence Howe’s essay ‘‘Poet
of History, Poet of Vision,’’ published inFields
Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret
Walker, part of the award citation reads,
You came of age in a world not friendly to
women or black people. You helped lead the
way towards changing that world. You offer all
of us, whatever our race, a vision of possibility.
Without diminishing the pain of prejudice,
conflict and war, you also see past the suffering
and sorrow into a different dimension.
Appreciation for Walker’s poem ‘‘Lineage’’
reflects the overall consensus of opinion about her
work. This poem, like many others of hers, is very
popular and is taught in classrooms from elemen-
tary school to college. Like much of Walker’s
poetry, its language is simple, its images are easy
to envision, and its message is comprehensible. For
these reasons, this particular poem has been anthol-
ogized in several poetry collections and is posted on
many Web sites.
The literary critic R. Baxter Miller, writing in
1981 inTennessee Studies in Literature, finds that
Walker’s poetry ‘‘purges the southern ground of
animosity and injustice which separate Black mis-
ery from Southern song.’’ Miller later remarks, ‘‘She
does not portray the gray-haired old women who
nod and sing out of despair and hope on Sunday
morning, but she captures the depths of their suffer-
ing.’’ Miller, like so many other critics, is pointing
out how Walker writes about suffering without
actually being explicit about it. She does not shy
away from the pain of the characters in her poems,
butrathersheportraysthesufferingin subtle innu-
endos, such that the reader senses the pain.
Indeed, Walker infuses her poetry with the suffer-
ing and sorrow of black women, especially those
who witnessed slavery firsthand, but she does so
without becoming morose. Looking ahead to bet-
ter times, she is praised for her prophetic vision as
well as for her steadiness, which allow her to look
back at pain without flinching. As Miller puts it,
‘‘The prophecy contributes to Walker’s rhythmical
balance and vision, but she controls the emotions.’’
Another reviewer, Maryemma Graham, in her
article ‘‘Margaret Walker: Fully a Poet, Fully a
Woman (1915–1998),’’ in the journalBlack Scholar,
takes up the same theme of Walker’s ability to make
suffering known while promising a better future:
It appears that Margaret Walker viewed her
life as part of a poem that was constantly evolv-
ing. Because she respected the values of her
own era—that defined womanliness primarily
in terms of first a romantic, then a nurturing,
maternal love—and transcended them at the
same time, her story exemplifies the impor-
tance of authorial agency for a writer whose
greatest gift was her capacity to imagine possi-
bilities where none existed.CRITICISMJoyce Hart
Hart is a published author and freelance writer. In
the following essay, she explores the quality of
universality in ‘‘Lineage.’’Lineage