Margaret walker alexander biography of barack obama

Margaret Abigail Walker was born on 7 July 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents, the Reverend Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister and an educator, and Marion Dozier Walker, a music teacher, encouraged her to read poetry and philosophy from an early age.

Walker completed her high school education at Gilbert Academy in New Orleans, Louisiana, where her family had moved in 1925.

Margaret walker alexander biography of barack obama

She went on to attend New Orleans University (now Dillard University) for two years. Then, after acclaimed poet Langston Hughes recognized her talent and urged her to seek training in the North, she transferred to Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, where she received a B.A.

in English in 1935, at the age of nineteen. In 1937, she published "For My People" in Poetry magazine. Her first poem to appear in print, “For My People” became one of her most famous works and was even anthologized in 1941 in The Negro Caravan.

In 1936, Walker took on full-time work with the