record her thoughts and the images that formed
the basis for her poetry. The daybook quickly
filled with numerous ‘‘ditties’’ and the details of
the stories of slavery that were her grandmother’s
forte. While her father pastored churches and
taught school and her mother finished college
and taught music in New Orleans, Walker com-
pleted her elementary and high school education
and began college.
As Walker has reported many times, it was a
visit by Langston Hughes to New Orleans Uni-
versity (now Dillard University) that gave her the
first opportunity to meet a famous ‘‘living Negro
poet.’’ Not only did Hughes comment upon and
encourage her talent, but he also stressed the
importance of formal training, which in his view
could only occur outside of the South. A few years
later, in 1934, Walker’s first published poem
appeared inCrisismagazine.
Two years after moving to Chicago, Walker
graduated from Northwestern University. She
was 20 years old and already had a collection
of poems along with the 300 pages ofJubileeshe
had drafted in her first college creative writing
course. Breaking from the mold of young
women of her time, especially for young black
women, Walker elected to remain in Chicago to
pursue her writing career. She found work with
the Federal Writers Project, which gave her
access to an active literary community and sus-
tained her financially during the middle years
of the Great Depression. More importantly, she
found herself in the midst of a renaissance among
a growing group of black writers. With the Harlem
Renaissance having waned some few years earlier,
Chicago writers now developed a new, distinctly
modern style of writing influenced by the proletar-
ian literature of the Communist left and the
populist realism of the midwestern writers Carl
Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters.
New fictional urban heroes and heroines emerged
for whom life in the ‘‘Promised Land’’ had turned
into a nightmare. In contrast to the Harlem Ren-
aissance, images became less romantic and the
sounds more conflicted. The rhythms of black life
had changed, and new writers were needed to cap-
ture these rhythms in prose and poetry. The core
of a group—led by RichardWright—who defined
this new literature began meeting as the South
Side Writers Group, and included most often Mar-
garet Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward
Bland, Ted Ward, Marian Minus, Fern Gaden,
and St. Clair Drake. Walker’s strong Christian
ideals and family values thatstressedalifeofsacri-
fice and service made her sympathetic to the social-
ist ideas about equality that influenced the group,
and further intensified her disdain for all forms of
discrimination and exploitation. Like many artists
and intellectuals of the 1930s, Walker became
familiar with Marxist thought and regarded herself
as a ‘‘fellow traveler,’’ although she was never a
card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
Almost always the youngest member of the left
front organizations she associated with and often
the only black woman participant, she earned an
early reputation for her inquisitive nature, her intel-
ligence, and her remarkable talent.
Between 1936 and 1939, working with the
WPA, attending regular meetings of the South
Side Writers Group, affiliating with left politics,
and publishing in black periodicals and mainstream
journals—at a time whenmost young women were
either looking to marry and begin their families
or settle into more conventional careers—Walker
established herself as a leading literary voice of her
generation. She completedher signature poem ‘‘For
My People,’’ after formingfriendships with writers
fromPoetrymagazine and working closely with
Wright.
Walker returned to school in 1939, this time to
complete her masters degree at the University of
Iowa, whereFor My Peoplebecame a full manu-
script, which she completed to satisfy the degree
requirements. After teaching at Livingstone College
(North Carolina) and West Virginia State College,
she received the Yale Younger Series of Writers
Award. Less than a year later, she met and married
Firnist James Alexander, settling down in High
Point, North Carolina to begin a family. The
Alexanders moved to Jackson, Mississippi with
three children in 1949, where she would teach for
thirty years at Jackson State College (now Jackson
State University). After the birth of her last child,
Walker became increasingly active as a pioneer in
promoting intellectual and professional ideas about
education and the teaching of literature and culture,
just as yet another shift was occurring in the social
order. Walker’s work becamecritical in articulating
the ideological concernsof the Civil Rights Move-
ment and beyond: her 1966 novelJubileewas one its
most important markers; and her 1973 Phillis
Wheatley Festival of Black Women Writers sig-
naled the birth of the black women’s literary ren-
aissance. The years between 1970 and her death in
1998 were her most productive. In addition to the
published volumes, speeches and readings, WalkerLineage