270 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the PresentAmericans. Like Langston Hughes’s “Th e Negro Speaks of
Rivers,” Walker’s titular poem became an oft -quoted verse
of civil rights protest. Th is poem is all the more remarkable
when one considers Walker’s assertion that it took her only
15 minutes to compose it on her typewriter.
Walker’s writing and her academic responsibilities
kept her busy during the 1940s; in 1942, she was given a
professorship at Livingston College in North Carolina, in
the English department, and she also lectured at Jackson
State University in Mississippi, where she was made a fac-
ulty member in 1949. In 1944, she won a Rosenwald Fel-
lowship for creative writing. From 1943 through 1948, she
was a lecturer with the National Concert Artists Corpora-
tion. In 1943, she married Firnish James Alexander and had
four children—two boys and two girls.
In her late 40s, she enrolled in a PhD program at Iowa
University, where she earned her degree in 1965, when she
was 50 years old. Her doctoral dissertation was the man-
uscript of her novel Jubilee. Th is book was published by
Houghton Miffl in in 1966, and that same year, Walker was
named a Houghton Miffl in literature fellow. Th ough she
published a handful of poems in the 1940s and 1950s, there
is a glaring gap in her publishing activity from 1942 until
the appearance of Jubilee in 1966. Th is silence can be at-
tributed to the fact that she was raising her family, teaching
at various colleges, and researching information for Jubilee,
which was set during the Civil War and contains signifi cant
biographical and historical data. A large part of this work is
based on the life of Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret
Duggans Ware Brown. It focuses on the antebellum period
through the Reconstruction and provides accurate details
about the plantation system and slavery in the South dur-
ing this time.
Th e bulk of this book’s content is based on the stories
Walker’s grandmother told her about her great-grand-
mother; her family’s oral history forms the backbone of the
novel. Walker began to fl esh out her story by researching
Civil War history and other black slave narratives when she
was an undergraduate at Northwestern, and she continued
to work on her book in between her teaching and family
duties.
Unlike traditional coming-of-age novels, Jubilee traces
the gender, class, and race awareness and evolution of Vyry,
a mulatto house servant. Vyry’s father is the master of the
plantation she lives on, and her mother was his mistress.
Her mother dies when she is seven years old, and she goesworks to various archives and research centers across the
United States.
See also: Africanisms; Gullah; Herskovits, Melville
Tamara T. ButlerBibliography
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.
Wade-Lewis, Margaret. Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah
Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2007.
Walker, Margaret
Margaret Abigail Walker (1915–1998), a poet, novelist, and
essayist, was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father,
Sigismond, was a native of Jamaica who earned a theologi-
cal degree and was ordained as a black Methodist minister,
and her mother, Marion, was a college-educated musician.
Walker was one of four children born to them. Together
they instilled in their daughter an awareness of and respect
for the power of words. Walker found her communicative
talent in poetry, which she began writing at age 12. She en-
rolled at Northwestern and earned her bachelor’s degree in
- Aft er graduation, she remained in Chicago for the
next four years to work, holding various publishing jobs
as a typist, a newspaper reporter, an editor of a magazine,
and a member of the Works Progress Administration’s Fed-
eral Writers’ Project. Her participation in this latter group
led to her introduction to several politically active writers
of the Chicago Renaissance, such as Nelson Algren, Rich-
ard Wright, James Farrell, Studs Terkel, and Gwendolyn
Brooks.
In 1939, she started a master’s program at the Univer-
sity of Iowa, and she earned her MA in 1940 by submitting
a collection of poems she had written as her thesis. In 1942,
when Walker was 27 years old, she published a volume of
poetry titled For My People, her fi rst book. She received im-
mediate recognition and praise for this book when she was
awarded the Yale University Younger Poets Competition
for the title poem, which also earned her the distinction of
being the fi rst African American ever to win the prize. In
For My People, Walker incorporates jazz and blues rhythms,
fi gures from folklore, religious imagery, and U.S. his-
tory to evoke the devastating eff ects of racism on African