Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life, career, and lasting legacy of Margaret Walker (1915–1998): her journey from the Jim Crow South to becoming a pioneering African-American poet and novelist. Discover her famous quotes, key works, and enduring lessons.

Introduction

Margaret Walker (July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet, novelist, educator, and literary critic whose work has left an indelible mark on African-American literature and the broader canon of American letters. Born in the segregated South, she rose to national prominence through her powerful poetry and her monumental novel Jubilee. She was the first African American woman to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and she dedicated much of her life to teaching, mentoring, and preserving black history and culture. Today, Walker is celebrated not only for her literary achievements but also for her role as a bridge across generations, connecting the voices of the past with the urgent conversations of her time.

Early Life and Family

Margaret Abigail Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker.

Walker’s early years were marked by familial storytelling and lessons in philosophy, literature, and religion. Her grandmother Elvira Ware Dozier, who had been born into slavery, would tell oral histories and narratives that deeply influenced Margaret’s sense of heritage, identity, and responsibility as a black writer.

When Walker was still young, the family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she attended Gilbert Academy for high school.

Youth and Education

Throughout her youth, Walker was an avid reader and student of literature. At age 11 she began reading works by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

She began her higher education at New Orleans University (now Dillard University) for a couple of years before transferring to Northwestern University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1935.

After college, she joined the Federal Writers’ Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago during the Great Depression (circa 1936).

In 1940, Walker earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. Ph.D., submitting Jubilee as part of her doctoral thesis.

Career and Achievements

Literary Breakthrough: For My People

In 1942, Walker’s poetry collection For My People was published and became a groundbreaking success. Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, making her the first African American woman to receive a national literary prize of that stature. Poetry magazine (1937), weaves together history, pain, hope, and the resilience of black Americans.

For My People is often considered one of the most significant collections from the Chicago Black Renaissance before Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville.

Jubilee and Novelistic Pursuits

Walker’s only novel, Jubilee (1966), is a sweeping family epic based on her great-grandmother’s life during and after slavery. Jubilee blends the personal and historical, confronting the legacies of slavery, Reconstruction, racial violence, and black survival.

Walker’s approach in Jubilee counters romanticized “lost cause” narratives by centering black voices, suffering, and perseverance.

Academic and Institutional Leadership

In 1949, Walker joined the faculty at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) in Mississippi, teaching literature and creative writing until her retirement in 1979.

In 1968, she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People (later known as the Margaret Walker Center) at Jackson State.

After retiring, Walker continued to publish and lecture. She authored Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), a literary and biographical study of her friend and fellow African-American writer, and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989) among other collections.

Legal and Literary Controversies

In 1978, Walker sued Alex Haley, alleging that Roots (1976) had infringed on Jubilee’s copyright through extensive borrowing. The case was dismissed.

Historical Milestones & Context

Margaret Walker’s life and work unfolded amid the crossroads of the Great Depression, Jim Crow segregation, World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Black Arts and Black Studies movements. Her formative years coincided with the Harlem Renaissance legacies and the rising consciousness of African-American artistic and political self-determination.

Her winning of the Yale Younger Poets award in 1942 struck a symbolic blow against racial barriers in literary institutions. Her deep engagement with black history, her institutional leadership in Jackson, and her efforts to center African-American voices contributed to the growth of black intellectual infrastructure in the mid 20th century.

The founding of her institute in 1968 was particularly timely, as Black Studies and ethnic studies became legitimate academic disciplines during and after the civil rights era.

Her novel Jubilee became part of a growing genre sometimes called “neo-slave narratives,” in which modern authors re-imagine and re-inscribe the lived experience of slavery from black perspectives.

Her influence extends beyond literature into cultural memory, historiography, and public arts commemorations, such as her induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014 and a historical marker on the Mississippi Writers Trail.

Legacy and Influence

Margaret Walker’s legacy is multifaceted:

• Literary Influence: Her poetry and novel continue to be studied in African-American and American literature courses for their blend of lyrical intensity, historical depth, and moral conviction.

• Cultural Memory: The Margaret Walker Center remains an archive and hub for black studies and history at Jackson State University.

• Inspiration to Writers: Walker is a role model for generations of African-American poets and novelists grappling with identity, memory, and racial justice.

• Institutional Impact: Her work in building institutional structures (archives, institutes, conferences) helped legitimize African-American history as a serious academic field.

• Public Recognition: She has been honored with markers, memorials, and posthumous recognitions, inscribing her name into regional and national cultural heritage.

Even beyond literature, her insistence on the dignity of human voices, her defense of history’s silenced narratives, and her commitment to community education resonate in social justice and cultural preservation movements today.

Personality and Talents

Walker was known for her intellectual seriousness, her profound empathy, and her disciplined work ethic. Peers remembered her as both a scholar and an activist: one who believed poetry must speak truth, confront suffering, and imagine better futures.

Her talents spanned lyricism, narrative invention, archival scholarship, and teaching. She combined a poet’s ear with a historian’s care, and she moved between poetry and prose with confidence. That capacity to inhabit multiple modes—lyric, epic, essay—allowed her to speak to varied audiences.

She was also a devoted teacher and mentor, guiding students and younger writers toward their own voices, and she understood the importance of institutional support (archives, centers, professors) for sustaining literary communities.

Famous Quotes of Margaret Walker

Here are some memorable quotes that reflect her thought, style, and moral vision:

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”

“Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.”

“Friends and good manners will carry you where money won’t go.”

“I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body’s Southern song—the fusion of the South, my body’s song and me.”

“Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.”

“My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.”

“The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.”

“I have always secretly felt that what mankind should be in an ideal sense is that mixture of people and races. I really believe in it. I don’t think there is anything sacred in the integrity of race, white or black.”

These quotes show Walker’s intimate voice: part visionary, part storyteller, part moralist. Her language is plain yet charged; her imagery rooted yet universal.

Lessons from Margaret Walker

From Margaret Walker’s life and work, we can draw lessons that remain relevant today:

1. Root your voice in history. Walker confronted the weight of centuries—slavery, segregation, racial violence—yet she looked backward not for nostalgia but for grounding, turning memory into strength.

2. Bridge individual and collective. Her poetry speaks both intimately (personal grief, love, aspiration) and communally (race, labor, social justice). She shows that the “I” and the “we” are not separate.

3. Persist in long journeys. Jubilee did not emerge overnight; it was decades of research, writing, revision. Her life reminds us that deep art often requires time, patience, and resilience.

4. Support infrastructures. She did not focus only on her own work; she built institutions, taught, archived, and mentored. She understood that individual genius thrives best in communities that preserve, support, and multiply.

5. Beware of silencing. She challenged literary gatekeeping and racial exclusion. Her example encourages writers and readers to question which voices are seen, heard, and preserved.

6. Speak truth with beauty. Even when confronting pain, Walker never surrendered lyricism. Her style shows that justice and artistry can—must—coexist.

Conclusion

Margaret Walker’s life was a bridge: between generations, histories, cultures, and forms of expression. Born into a segregated America but born with stories in her bones, she channeled ancestral voices to speak to her own time—and ours. She redefined what it meant to be a black woman writer in a literary world that often sidelined both. Her poetry, her novel, her essays, and her institutional work continue to challenge, inspire, and teach.

To encounter Walker is to meet a creator who refused to be silent, who held memory and imagination in tension, and who believed that the poet’s duty is both to bear witness and to hope. May her life spark curiosity, her quotes stir courage, and her legacy remind us that art is a living, breathing inheritance.

If you’d like, I can also provide a more extensive selection of her poems, annotated analysis of Jubilee, or a timeline of her life.