Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is an activist, novelist, poet, speaker and "womanist". Today's Out Spotlight is Pulitzer Prize winning writer Alice Walker.

Alice Malsenior Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, a sharecropper only earned $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. To provide for their large family, her mother Minnie went out to work as a maid to bring in enough money to raise the family of ten. When Walker was older, Minnie worked 11 hours a day for $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.

Living under Jim Crow Laws in Georgia, her parents resisted landlords who expected their children to work the fields on the landowners farms. One white owner told Walker's that blacks had “no need for education.” Minnie replied, "You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Minnie enrolled Walker in first grade at the age of four.

Growing up within the great oral tradition of passing down the stories and history of her family, Walker listened to the stories from her grandfather Walker and began writing stories, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind."

Around that same time, Walker was accidentally wounded in her right eye from a shot from BB gun one of her brothers was using. The family, so poor they didn’t own a car, couldn't take Walker immediately to a hospital because they had no way to get there. By the time they got to a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. Scar tissue formed over her eye, making the young Alice self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and taunted by her peers, she turned to reading and to writing poetry as a way to sooth the pain of being made to feel an outcast. At the age of 14, the scar tissue was removed from her eye bringing a change for Walker during her teen years. Always bright, she was valedictorian of her class, but Walker also came out of her shell, being voted most-popular girl, and crowned queen of her senior class. She has said that it was through that experience of her childhood had allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out".

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965.

Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. It was also at Spelman where she met Martin Luther King Jr. She also credits Dr. King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. During college she marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington and she continued when she returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives in Georgia and Mississippi, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.

In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year they relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming "the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi". They faced prejudice and racism as an interracial couple and were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan in their new home state. In 1969, their daughter Rebecca was born. Talking about her daughter in 2008, Walker described her as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge." Walker and Leventhal divorced amicably in 1976.

Walker and her daughter became estranged in the years after her parent’s divorce. Rebecca published a memoir in 2000 entitled Black White and Jewish, expressing the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood. Rebecca criticized both of her parents as self-absorbed after their divorce and that she felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter" to them.

Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She then took a brief sabbatical from writing while working in Mississippi in the civil rights movement. In 1970, her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published.

She began teaching at Wellesley College in 1972. Her course, dedicated to the study of African-American women writers, was the first of its kind. “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” was published in 1974, and it was there she coined the phrase “womanist” to describe black feminists.

She continued her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. Her 1975 article helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who inspired Walker's writing.

In 1976, her second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.

What followed next was her most famous novel, “The Color Purple”. The Color Purple went on to win a National Book Award and made Walker the first African-American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story of a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not only racist white culture but also patriarchal black culture captured readers everywhere. Walker has said that her grandfather was the model for Mr. in the story. The Color Purple not only gained critical praise but became a worldwide bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover. The film earned 11 Oscar nominations. In 2005, “The Color Purple” was adapted as a Broadway musical, with Winfrey as the lead financial backer.

Walker has continued to write including several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy (which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple). She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and essays. In her writing she expresses the struggles of blacks, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society.

She has also continued her activism, speaking out on issues she feels most passionate about. She is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, and the eve of the Iraq War, Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior; and Terry Tempest Williams, author of An Unspoken Hunger; were arrested along with 24 others for crossing a police line during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House. Walker and 5,000 activists associated with anti-war group Code Pink and Women for Peace, marched from Malcolm X Park in Washington D.C. to the White House. The activists encircled the White House. In an interview with Democracy Now, Walker said, "I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves." Walker wrote about the experience in her essay, "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For."

In November 2008, she wrote "An Open Letter to Barack Obama" that was published on Theroot.com. In it she addresses the newly elected President as "Brother Obama" and writes "Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina, and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about."

In March 2009, she traveled to Gaza along with a group of 60 other female activists from the Code Pink, in response to the controversial Israeli offensive of December 2008-January 2009. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with non-government organizations and residents, and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza.

In addition to her National Book Award and her Pulitzer Prize Walk has received awards including a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, an American Book Award, a Lillian Smith Award and an O’Henry Award. She was inducted into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame and the California Hall of Fame. In 1997, Walker was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In 2007, Walker gave her papers, 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled "Poems of a Childhood Poetess".

In the mid-1990s, Walker was in a romantic relationship with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. It wasn’t until 2006 before she spoke of it. She said then, that at the time she didn’t want to serve as anyone’s poster woman for lesbianism, and that’s why she’s kept quiet about it, until 2006. After an interviewer was politely told that she would not discuss her family life, they told Walker how people were still fascinated with her relationship with Chapman. Upon hearing that Walker’s face light up at the mention of Chapman and said “Yeah I loved it too. Absolutely.”

Asked why was it kept so quiet at the time she said “It was quiet to you maybe but that’s because you didn’t live in our area. Asking her why they decided against using their relationship to make a big social impact like other celebrity lesbian couples, a bit amused at the thought of that, she responded “I would never do that. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact - you know what I mean? And it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.” She went say that has written about the relationship in her journals, which she plans to publish one day.

“The truest and most enduring impulse I have is simply to write.”