Alice Walker

She received a writing fellowship and was planning to spend it in Senegal, West Africa, but her plans changed when she decided to take ajob as a case worker in the New York City welfare department. Walker later moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she became more involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Did you know when Rosa Parks got arrested for not giving up her seat she was sitting in the African American section? Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist that worked with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to change African American rights. She was born on February 4th, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She went to college at the Alabama State Teachers College. After her college education, she became the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP.

Wells married with the founder of the first black newspaper in the Chicago, and they had children. As she had her family to take care of, she had a divided duty and could not only focus on her writing. She found and build new organization of colored people (NAACP) based on lynching strategy. In her sixties, she came back to the South. In the South prison, she talked with some black people about what happened over there.

Walker, being left blind, was teased by her schoolmates, and resented her father, and often at times felt suicidal. She then began to write poetry and stories, finding comfort in the solitude it afforded her. Walker grew up attending segregated schools, first East Putnam Consolidated, and then Butler Baker High School, where she graduated in 1961 as Valedictorian of her class. She then attended Atlanta’s Spelman College, a college for black women, on a scholarship. In 1963, she was awarded another scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

She was the eighth and the last child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. In the summer of 1952 at the age of eight, she fell into a depression when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun, causing her to lost one sight of her eye. (LLC n.pag) She later started to hidden herself from the other kids in her neighborhood. She explained, "I no longer felt like the little girl I was.

Throughout her writing career, Alice Walker has been involved in the black movement and displays strong feelings towards the respect black women get. In 1961, Walker entered Spelman College, where she joined the Civil Rights Movement. Two years after graduating in 1965, she married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer; afterward, they worked together in Mississippi, registering blacks to vote. In the summer of 1968, she went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off farms or taken off welfare roles for registering to vote. In New York, she worked as an editor at Ms. Magazine, and her husband worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Alice Walker is an American author, novelist, short story writer, poet and political activist. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944, the youngest child of eight. Her parents, a sharecropper and a maid, had little money. At the age of eight, her right eye was scarred and caused her partial blindness because her parents were unable to take her to the doctor for a week. The blindness left her to become teased and bullied by classmates; she became withdrawn and began writing to escape daily ridicule.

Wells was born the daughter of slaves in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. During Reconstruction, she was educated at a Missouri Freedman's School, Rust University, and began teaching school at the age of fourteen. In 1884, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she continued to teach while attending Fisk University during summer sessions. In Tennessee, especially, she was appalled at the poor treatment she and other African-Americans received. After she was forcibly removed from her seat for refusing to move to a "colored car" on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected her suit against the railroad for violating her civil rights in 1877.

Alice walker Alice Walker is a well known poet, novelist, essayist, educator, biographer, and editor and her quote “Black women can survive only by recovering the rich heritage of their ancestors,” best characterizes her works and life as a black women in this world. Alice Malsenior Walker born February 8, 1944 in Eatonton, Ga. The youngest of eight children, her parents Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah were sharecroppers and dairy farmers. From an early age she was introverted and quite shy, possibly a result of her temporary disfigurement and permanent blindness, a result of one of her brothers shooting her in the eye with a bb gun. She felt that she was ugly and unpleasant to look at so she retreated into solitude, reading poems and stories then writing.

An author known for her womanist writing, Alice Walker writes stories on relationships between women and the rights of African Americans. Born in Georgia in 1944, Alice Walker knew of the economic oppression and domination of her race at an early age but despite these struggles, Alice was a witty and pretty child. However at the age of eight, a mishap with a BB gun left her scarred, blind in one eye, and emotional unstabled. According to Alice, this accident traumatically affected the way she saw and thought of herself bringing her to have thoughts of suicide. Walker was able to remove the scar tissue six years after the accident, and her partial blindness allowed her a scholarship to Spelman College (1+2).