founded the Institute for the Study of Black Life
and Culture, one of the earliest Black Studies for-
mations in the nation and the first in the South. By
the end of her life, Walker, a woman born of Vic-
torian ideals, who had left the South and returned
to it as one of its most radical black thinkers, had
become a widely-known artist whose freely crafted
prose and poetry left an indelible mark on the
modern age. It is impossible to think about the
Chicago Renaissance, the Civil Rights and Black
Arts Movement or the Women’s Movement with-
out giving acknowledgement to her work. Perhaps
her greatest legacy lies in her creative struggle as a
highly conscious individual who found a way to
balance a demanding professional life and full
engagement as a wife and mother, challenging our
contemporary conceptions of seemingly contradic-
tory domains.
In fifty-two years, Walkerpublished eleven
books, includingFor My People(1942),Jubilee
(1966),Prophets for a New Day(1970),How I
Wrote Jubilee(1972),October Journey(1973),A
Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Gio-
vanni and Margaret Walker(1974),For Farish
Street(1986),Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius
(1988),This is My Century: New and Collected
Poems by Margaret Walker(1989);How I Wrote
Jubilee and Other Essayson Life and Literature
(1990), andOn Being Female, Black and Free:
Essays by Margaret Walker 1932–1992(1997). An
untold number of poems, short stories, reviews,
letters, and speeches remain to be collected. When
Walker retired from teaching in 1979 at age sixty-
four, she did so with the intention of continuing an
active career as a writer, public speaker, and com-
munity reformer. It was at this time that she began
the biography of Richard Wright, only to have the
book interrupted by illness, a lengthy court battle,
the death of her husband, and repeated publication
delays.
Walker’s two collections of essays,How I
Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays, andOn Being
Female, Black and Free, published in the last
decade of her life, best illuminate her importance
to the history of ideas that has been reflected in
black writing in America for half a century and
to contemporary developments in literary and
social thought. With the lead essay recounting
the thirty-year journey toJubilee, the remainder
ofHow I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essayscom-
ments upon the culture of America and the ideas
so central to it—religion, family, racial con-
sciousness, the role of women—thereby serving
as a useful introduction to Margaret Walker’s
thought. As much as any individual artist,
Walker reflects the fusion of ideas that she inher-
ited from the radical 1930s, tempered by her own
cultural and social background, one that was
rooted in a strong religious faith and belief in
the ultimate goodness of humankind. In her
essay ‘‘Willing to Pay the Price,’’ Walker points
out her major concerns as a writer:
As a Negro I am perforce concerned with all
aspects of the struggle for civil rights... Civil
rights are part of my frame of reference, since I
must of necessity write always about Negro
life, segregated or integrated... I believe my
role in the struggle is the role of a writer. Every-
thing I have ever written or hope to write is
dedicated to that struggle, to our hope of peace
and dignity and freedom in the world, not just
as Black people, or as Negroes, but as free
human beings in a world community... I do
not deny, however, the importance of political
action and of social revolution... I believe that
as a teacher my role is to stimulate my students
to think; after that, all I can do is guide them.
Walker’s comments bring to mind the works of
three early Afro-American women, Ann Plato,
Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Harper. Like
Plato, the earliest known Afro-American essayist,
Cooper, a feminist intellectual, and Harper, the
renowned antislavery poet/activist, Walker pur-
sued her own sense of individual identity while
atthesametimecommittingherselftothestream
of collective history. Like Cooper and Harper,
Walker represented a small number of college edu-
cated women whose choice to develop and define a
career put her at odds with the majority of women
in her time. On the other hand, unlike her prede-
cessors, Walker became a ‘‘working mother’’ who
encountered throughout her life the typical social
and economic hardships: poverty and unemploy-
ment, racial and sexual discrimination, and consis-
tently poor health. The unevenness of her own
personal history attests to the negative impact of
race and gender prejudice in the lives of even the
most talented African Americans. Nevertheless,
Walker’s voice broke through the silence of wom-
en’s lives, her life always modeling the ideas she
believed in so firmly. Frances Harper appears to
be Walker’s closest literary ancestor in her preoccu-
pation with social issues while at the same time
maintaining her reputation as a leading poet of
her day.
The second collection of essays, published a
year before Walker’s death, is decidedly more
autobiographical than the first.On Being Female,Lineage