Alice Walker Recalls the Civil Rights Battle

Alice Walker on NYTimes.com

Alice Walker talks with Herbert Mitgang about how she came to work within the Civil Rights Movement, some of the dire consequences she faced as a result of that work, and how the Movement itself inspired some of her greatest poetry.

Photo: Bettmann, 1960

Alice Walker: Seeing Purple in a Field

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

Alice Walker: The High Priestess of the Left and the Left-Behind

Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers, Alice Walker's beginnings in the rural South set her on a course to become one the world's most revered literary figures and activists. At the age of eight, an accident with a BB gun left her blind and badly scarred in her right eye after a game of Cowboys and Indians with her brother went awry. As a result, she became an intensely solitary person, passionately delving into the art of the word. What became of Alice Walker after that day changed the face of southern women's writing, and American literature as a whole.

Walker furthered her education in the early 1960s 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. After receiving her BA form Sarah Lawrence, she moved to Jackson, Mississippi with her new husband, Melvin Rosenthal, a white civil rights attorney. The two sparked a furor in highly-segregated Mississippi, as interracial marriages were still deemed illegal.

In 1968, Walker published her first volume of Poetry, Once. The collection described her experiences during the Civil Rights Movement in America, encounters while traveling in Africa, and her battle against depression and thoughts of suicide after deciding to undergo an abortion. The Third Life of Grange Copeland was her first novel, published in 1970. It drew attention to the struggle of blacks in rural areas and succeeded in reaching a multigenerational audience. Her second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1973. The same year, she published her first collection of short fiction, In love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She became more political in her written work with Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979), which served as a tribute to black political leaders and writers. She followed with several more collections of poetry, short fiction, and essays throughout the eighties and nineties, garnering her a substantial amount of recognition.

The most public expression of heartfelt praise was directed to Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple (1982). The book chronicles the story of Celie, a poor and uneducated young girl living in rural Georgia. Celie encounters many hardships throughout her life, including having to endure incestuous rape and an abusive arranged marriage. Celie learns to survive through relationship she forms with the women around her. She befriends a strong-willed woman, Shug. It is through her self-affirming experiences with women that Celie can finally stand up on her own in a world run by men. With Walker's help, film director Steven Spielberg brought the novel to life on the screen in 1985. In 2004, a musical adaptation of The Color Purple produced by Oprah Winfrey debuted in Atlanta, Georgia, and then on Broadway in New York in 2005.

Walker's 1983 collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose introduced "womanism" as a term referring to black southern feminism - something very near and dear to Walker's heart. Interestingly enough, while almost all of Walker's work is "womanist," it manages to reach people of all genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. While often criticized as a"anti-male" or "male-bashing," Walker defends her work as pieces of literature that reflect what actually happens in the world. Her work transcends time and the confines of society and bridges the gaps between generations and races. She remains one of the most outspoken literary figures and activists today, continuing to write and lecturing around the world on topics pertaining to everything form the attacks of September 11th, to genital mutilation overseas, to the benefits of engaging in oral sex. Walker continues to push people's buttons, and in doing so, initiates thought-provoking discussions around the globe that perpetuate the cycle of living and learning.