Alice Walker
(b. 1944)

Alice Walker is an acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist whose published work spans three decades. She is known for her strong, believable women characters and her unflinching portrayals of their struggles in a world that is often brutal. Walker's honest depiction of African American life in the twentieth century resonates with the urgency of the need for change as well as with a sense of optimism for the future.

Born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker was the youngest of eight children. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother a domestic worker. Both were storytellers–particularly her mother, who Walker describes as "a walking history of our community." Her father was the first African American man in his county to cast a ballot in a political election. Sadly, Walker mostly remembers her father as an older, tired man who had suffered tremendous hardship. Her mother, she remembers as endowed with an almost superhuman strength. She worked in the fields, cooked, and cleaned. Her beautiful flower gardens were an ever-present symbol of hope and beauty for the young Walker. She would later memorialize her mother's artistry in her collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.

When Walker was eight years old, her older brother accidentally shot her in the right eye with a BB gun. The accident permanently blinded her in that eye, and left scar tissue that made her feel ugly. The once-outgoing Walker was now ashamed to look at people. Resigned to being a social outcast, she became a keen observer of life, devouring books and writing poetry. When, at age 15, she finally had an operation to remove the scar tissue, Walker felt reborn. She was voted high school prom queen and graduated class valedictorian.

During the years 1961–1963, Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on scholarship. While at Spelman, Walker was caught up in the fervor of the civil rights movement and participated in demonstrations. With her transfer to the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York State, however, she found herself in a very different environment. At Sarah Lawrence she was one of only six African American students in the school, in contrast to the all-black schools she attended in Georgia.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Walker became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement by registering voters in Georgia and campaigning for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi. In 1966, Walker received a fellowship that would have allowed her to go to Africa, but she decided to continue her civil rights work in Mississippi. She based her decision on "the realization that I could never live happily in Africa–or anywhere else–until I could live freely in Mississippi." Her experiences fighting for change are dramatized in her second novel, Meridian, published in 1976.

With the end of the tumultuous sixties, Walker turned to teaching at the university level and focusing her energies on writing. During this time Walker rediscovered the work of Zora Neale Hurston, a writer from the period known as the "Harlem Renaissance."

After publishing two novels and numerous collections of poetry, Walker's third novel, The Color Purple, made her the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Published in 1982, The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a poor black woman striving to define her role in an oppressive society. The book would later be made into the Academy Award-nominated film, for which Walker herself wrote the screenplay.

Although she remains connected to her Southern roots, Alice Walker eventually left the South, relocated to New York City, and now resides in Northern California. She has focused her activism on Native American issues, women's issues, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, as well as antinuclear and environmental issues. Her collection of poetry, Horses Make A Landscape Look More Beautiful, expresses her deep reverence for the environment.

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the legal segregation of blacks and whites in the South. Laws that enforced segregation, also known as Jim Crow laws, specified that certain places, such as schools, public transportation, restaurants–even drinking fountains–be designated "For Whites Only" and others "For Colored Only." These laws endured until 1954 when the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, deemed that separate educational facilities were unequal and therefore unconstitutional. Racial tensions began to escalate. Black students, accompanied by federal troops, integrated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger spurred the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Other challenges to segregation sprang from these acts of courage. Voter registration campaigns were established in the heavily African American, rural counties of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.

Martin Luther King, Jr., became a national figure and led tens of thousands of Americans in the famous March on Washington, where he delivered his inspiring oration "I Have A Dream." A year later, in 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited both discrimination in education and employment and segregation in public places.

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