Walker was educated at Spelman College in Atlanta, and later at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, during which time she became actively involved with the Civil Rights Movement. In June of 1966, she began her most effective Civil Rights activism work through her involvement with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commonly referred to at the time by its members as “The Inc. Fund” (White 136). Through The Inc. Fund, Walker and several others helped those whose rights were revoked as a result of attempting to register to vote. Because of her outstanding writing skills, Walker was assigned to take depositions by those sharecroppers who had been evicted from their homes in various lawsuits against whites who acted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which overturned the Jim Crow laws already in place in the South. She also worked closely with the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which played a major role in such monumental Civil Rights events as peaceful sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the 1963 March on Washington (Carson). As SNCC was founded by and primarily organized and run by African-American women, Walker fit right in as a productive part of the team, promoting the ideology behind the activist organization in the face of a highly segregated and sexist South. The pairing of her small town upbringing and her extremely public and political work in the Movement allowed Walker’s sympathies for low income African-Americans – most specifically women – to become prominent components of her literary work.
Photo: Dennis Whitehead, 1982
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