distinguished alumni award
Margaret Walker Alexander
Achievement 1988
Margaret Walker Alexander, 40MA, 65PhD,
exemplifies an unforgettable generation of gifted Black Americans who
were able to overcome, in part, the social inequality that still plagues
our society. Her 30-year struggle to perfect the novel Jubilee—the
fictionalized account of her great-grandmother's adjustment from slavery
to life during Reconstruction—forms an inspiring backdrop to the
career of an outstanding writer and educator.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama,
in 1915, Margaret Walker remembers the bedtime stories her grandmother
told about Margaret Duggans Ware
Brown
and recalls her youthful promise that she would someday write about
her great-grandmother. Walker's poetic talent emerged while she was
attending schools in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In New
Orleans, she caught the attention of poet and family friend Langston
Hughes,
who encouraged her to strive for musicality in verse.
Walker enrolled
as a junior at her father's alma mater, Northwestern University,
when she was just 17. During her undergraduate years, she
had her first poem published with the help of W.E.B. DuBois and she
began to work on Jubilee. But, by the time she graduated in
1935, the novel was still a rough, unfinished piece.
While working
for the Federal Writers Project in Chicago—where
she met friend Richard Wright—Walker wanted to learn more about
how to write a novel. She read in Life magazine about a program
of the newly created UI Writers' Workshop that offered degrees for
creative work. With unfinished manuscript in tow, she came to Iowa
to study English in 1939.
The move had its happy consequences. She
penned a volume of poetry for her 1940 master's thesis that won the
Yale Award for Younger Poets.
The title poem of For My People, a much acclaimed literary
tribute to Black Americans, earned her a 1942 Rosenwald Fellowship
for creative
writing.
Walker wrote poetry and worked on Jubilee whenever
teaching responsibilities and helping husband Firnist James Alexander
raise
their four children allowed. She taught during the 1940s at both
Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and West Virginia
State College.
In 1949, she accepted the English professorship that she still maintains
at Jackson State College, Mississippi.
A decade of research into
the historical period of her novel—including
a semester at Yale financed by a Ford Foundation grant—culminated
in her 1962 return to Iowa City to pursue a doctorate aimed at completing Jubilee.
It was a triumphant time when she submitted her dissertation in the
spring of 1965 and had it accepted for publication weeks later.
Jubilee won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award
for 1966 and renewed interest in Walker's poetry. Her collection
of Prophets
for a New Day (1970) was followed by the melancholy October
Journey(1973), its title poem composed in 1949 in reaction to
the stagnation and resentment she encountered as a young woman returning
to the South. In 1972, her book How I Wrote Jubilee was published
and in 1974 Dr. Walker illuminated generational differences between
poets in The Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni
and Margaret Walker. Walker continues to teach and write in Jackson,
the town she paid homage to in Poems for Farish Street (1985). Richard
Wright, Daemonic Genius and a book of new and collected poems, This
Is My Century, are this year's planned relea
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