Press photo of Margaret Walker and her daughter sitting together on a couch. Walker was born in Georgia, lives in Iowa City. The newspaper article itself is affixed to the back of the press photo, as well as a snippet from another article quoting Walker as saying “‘ I prefer living in the South,’ says Margaret Walker.” The longer article describes that Walker “has a B.A. from Northwestern University in Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Both of her parents have degrees from Northwestern as well.” The article continues: “I found out then,” Walker goes on, “that the North is no paradise for black people. Racism is more subtle there, but it is just as egregious as it is in the South. The best place blacks can be is where the largest number of blacks are. And in this country, that’s in the South.”
Poet and novelist Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, and her family moved when she was young to New Orleans. she was the first Black woman to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her first collection of poetry, For My People (1942). Her first novel, Jubilee (1966), was called “the first truly historical black American novel,” by Crispin Y. Campbell contributor for the Washington Post. Her novel Jubilee took her thirty years to complete.