
Poet Nikki Giovanni described Margaret Walker as “the most famous person nobody knows.”
A poet, novelist and scholar, “Walker participated in virtually every significant African American literary movement,” California Newsreel states. “Her signature poem, ‘For My People,’ written when she was 22, set a tone and a level of commitment, which African American literature has been responding to ever since.”
Born in 1915 in Birmingham, Ala., Walker grew up in New Orleans. She went to Gilbert Academy and attended New Orleans College, which became Dillard University.
Encouraged by poet Langston Hughes to leave the South, Walker transferred to Northwestern University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1935. At the University of Iowa, she earned a master’s degree in 1940 and a doctorate in 1965. She joined the Jackson State University faculty in 1949.
Walker’s first published poem was “I Want To Write.” She wrote “For My People” in 1937 and published her first collection of poems in 1942. That year, she became the first Black woman to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In 1966, she published a historical novel, “Jubilee,” based on her grandmother’s memories.
Then Walker founded Jackson State’s Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People, which became the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center. She retired as the center’s director.
A victim of breast cancer, Walker died in Chicago in 1998. An unfinished book found in her archives is set to be published in 2025.
“Walker has been compared to many great writers and has claimed, as personal acquaintances and influences, the likes of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks,” the Internet Poetry Archive states. “Over the course of her career, she earned a place among the best … American poets, many of whom were her protégés.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.