Margaret Walker Alexander, like Richard Wright, came from that unforgettable generation of gifted black Americans in the early 20th century who were able to view and communicate the social and racial inequalities that existed in society at the time and which still plague society today. She wrote mainly on black themes, and is best known for her slave narrative Jubilee (1966) and her much acclaimed World War II era poem For My People (1942).

She was born Margaret Abigail Walker in Birmingham, Ala., in 1915 to Methodist minister and teacher Reverend Sigismund Walker and her mother, Marion Dozier Walker. As a child, she was encouraged to read poetry and philosophy, thus spawning her literary interests. Friend and poet Sonia Sanchez described her as “a woman of ideas, a first-rate philosopher and thinker.” But despite her position as daughter of a minister and college professor, she grew up having to deal with the Jim Crow South. “Before I was ten,” she said in a 1940 interview, “I knew what it was to step off a sidewalk to let a white man pass…my father was chased home one night at the point of a gun by a drunken policeman who resented a fountain pen in a black man’s pocket.”

She began her writing career in the early 1930s, and was a member of the Works Progress Administration. She later became associated with other artists and writers and formed the Southside Writers Group, led by her close friend Richard Wright. Walker, however, was destined to follow an academic path. She attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1935 with a bachelor’s degree; she then attended the University of Iowa, earning her master’s in 1940. Her epic poem For My People was the title poem in her thesis, earning her the coveted Yale Award for Younger Poets that year, and the Rosenwald Fellowship for creative writing in 1942. She returned to Iowa and completed a Ph.D. in 1965. In 1949, she became an English professor at Jackson State College. She lived in Mississippi for the rest of her life.

Her widely acclaimed novel Jubilee begun in the 1930s, took her nearly 30 years to finish. It is the seminal story of Walker’s great grandmother, Elvira Dozier Ware, the daughter of a white master and a slave. Told from Elvira’s viewpoint, it is at once a tale of stunning brutality and inconvenient absurdities in which Elvira maintains her own set of contradictory values; at one point, she even chooses to remain a slave rather than flee and risk being separated from her children. It remains Walker’s literary masterwork for which she received national critical acclaim.

Margaret Walker was married to Firnist James Alexander and had four children. She died of cancer in Chicago in 1998. She was 83.

by Stephen Enzweiler

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
	Walker Percy	Willie Morris