Margaret Walker, 'For My People'

Margaret Walker arrived at Jackson State College in nineteen forty-nine with a doctorate from the University of Iowa and a book of poetry that had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in nineteen forty-two. She was the first Black woman to win a national writing prize.

She stayed at Jackson State for thirty years. She taught English, built a department, and in nineteen sixty-eight founded what would become the Margaret Walker Center, the first institutional home for Black literary and cultural studies at a Mississippi university. When she retired as Professor Emerita in nineteen seventy-nine, she had built something that outlasted her tenure and her lifetime. The center now holds her papers, the papers of the Jackson State killings, and the archives of the Gibbs-Green tragedy.

Her poem "For My People," written in nineteen thirty-seven as part of her master's thesis, begins with a catalog: for the people who have lived along on washboards and dust, who have had no part in the progress of the modern world except to be exploited. It builds like a litany, stanza by stanza, until it arrives at an image of a new earth, a new people, a generation that is not afraid. Stephen Vincent Benet, who selected her manuscript for the Yale prize, called the title poem one of the most moving poems he had encountered in years.

Her novel Jubilee, published in nineteen sixty-six, took thirty years to research and write. It draws on her grandmother Elvira Ware Dozier's memories of slavery and Reconstruction in Georgia and Alabama. It is one of the earliest novels to center the experience of an enslaved Black woman as a fully realized protagonist, not an object of sympathy but a subject with interior life and historical agency.

Walker died in Jackson on November thirtieth, nineteen ninety-eight, at the age of eighty-three. She is buried there.