Margaret Walker

Margaret Abigail Walker was born on the seventh of July 1915 at Birmingham, Alabama, the eldest of four children of the Reverend Sigismund Walker — a Methodist minister of Jamaican birth — and Marion Dozier Walker, a music teacher trained at the New England Conservatory of Music. The family was theologically and politically educated; her parents read Shakespeare and the Bible aloud at the dinner table through her childhood. She entered Northwestern University at fifteen on her father's promise to the dean that she could complete the work at the standard of older students. She took the bachelor's at nineteen in 1935.

She moved to Chicago after graduation and joined the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA, working under the direction of the writer Sterling A. Brown alongside Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Ted Ward and Willard Motley. The Wright-Walker correspondence of this period — preserved in the Wright papers at Yale — constitutes one of the principal documentary records of pre-war Black Chicago literary life. She took the master's at the University of Iowa under Paul Engle in 1940. Her master's thesis was the volume of poems she would publish two years later as For My People — which won the 1942 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the first time the prize had been awarded to an African American writer.

She joined the faculty of Livingstone College in North Carolina in 1941, of West Virginia State in 1942, and from 1949 the English department of Jackson State College in Mississippi, where she remained for the following thirty years. She founded at Jackson State in 1968 the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People — among the first such institutes at any historically Black college — and directed it for the remainder of her academic career.

Her decisive prose achievement was the historical novel Jubilee of 1966 — twenty-six years in the making, drawn from the oral history of her maternal great-grandmother Margaret Duggans Ware Brown — published the year before Alex Haley's Roots and counted as one of the founding works of the post-war African American historical novel. The book sold over a million copies in its first decade.

She died at Chicago on the thirtieth of November 1998, at eighty-three.

She is honored here as the author of For My People.