Margaret Walker
Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and author. She wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her most known poems is "For My People".
Her father Sigismund C. Walker was a Methodist minister and her mother was Marion Dozier Walker. They helped get her started in literature by teaching a lot of philosophy and poetry to her as a child.
In 1935, Walker received her Bachelors of Arts Degree from Northwestern University and in 1936 she began work with the Federal Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration. In 1942 she received her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965 she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D. She also for a time served as a professor at what is today Jackson State University.
Her literature generally contained African American themes. Among her more popular works were her poem For My People, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and her 1966 novel Jubilee, which received critical acclaim.
Margaret Walker died of breast cancer in Chicago in 1998.
“Keeping hatred inside makes you git mean and evil inside. We supposen to love everybody like God loves us. And when you forgives you feels sorry for the one what hurt you, you returns love for hate, and good for evil. And that stretches your heart and makes you bigger inside with a bigger heart so's you can love everybody when your heart is big enough. Your chest gets broad like this, and you can lick the world with a loving heart! Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor. Folks with a loving heart don't never need no doctor.”
“it's what makes you grow up to have younguns and be a sho-nuff mammy all your own ... . A man ain't but trouble, just breath and britches and trouble”
“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”