The Literary and Historical Importance of Margaret Walker Alexander’s Life February 21, 2015

Margaret Walker

Yaddo 1943

1971 Langston Hughes Festival

1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival

Paula Giddings and Alice Walker

Mari Evans, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan

Stone Mountain

Leo Frank and Mary Phagan

Birth of a Nation

Booker T. Washington’s Funeral 1915 Tuskegee Institute

Sigismund WalkerMarion Dozier Walker

Journal 15 June 11,

I Want to Write I want to write I want to write the songs of my people. I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark. I want to catch the last floating strains from their sob-torn throats. I want to frame their dreams into words; their souls into notes. I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl; fling dark hands to a darker sky and fill them full of stars then crush and mix such lights till they become a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.

Jackson State University 1952

St. Clair Drake 1971 National Evaluative Conference on Black Studies

Sterling A. Brown

For My People For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding;…. For my people standing trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the dams and eves and their countless generations; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace by written in the sky. Let a second generation fill of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and strength of final clenching by the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs by written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

Guynes Street Garden Club

“Vyry” Margaret Duggans Ware Brown “Minna” Elvira Ware Dozier

Nick Aaron Ford and Alex Haley

Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka

Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People

1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival

Margaret Walker

Eudora Welty