Upon her return, she received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. 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. She used her own and others’ experiences as material for her searing examinations of politics. She also volunteered her time working at the voter registration drive in Mississippi.
After her college education, she became the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. “She trained in nonviolent methods of social activism and was therefore well prepared for her historic role” (Matthews). The actions of Rosa Parks were important as they would change the course of African American history. “Rosa Parks was small as a child and suffered poor health with chronic tonsillitis. Her parents separated when she was young, so her and her mother moved to Pine Level which is right outside the capital of Montgomery.
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.
After graduating, Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they celebrated black heritage with Negro history week and introduced to her the idea of b... ... middle of paper ... ... of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. The other, Sula Peace, rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college, submerges herself in city life, and when she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker, a wanton sexual seductress.”(Back Cover) The relationship between the young women throughout a certain portion of their lives was put on hold due to the distance between them. Sula chose to move away from Ohio when she was young and therefore somewhat abandoned the life that the two girls had in previous years.
Walker then wrote her next book Meridian and that story told about some events in her own life. Walker attended Spelman, which is an all black women’s school. Walker composed other smal... ... middle of paper ... ...rest of the world. “(The) women in Purple build a wall of camaraderie around themselves.” (Parker-Smith 62). Historically speaking, this novel affects the view of African American women in the south and white men in the south.
In relation, Alice’s older sibling shot her in the eye. This blinded her and made her feel like she was unpleasant to look at. She secluded herself and felt ashamed. These events led to the other, non-social activities. Alice Walker, after being blinded by the BB gun, turns to reading stories and writing poetry.
In the age of 8 she started to wrote secretly. She got injured in the eye by a BB gun accidentally by one of her brothers. Even though she was hurt, she still protected her brother from her parents’ anger and since they were poor and had no car, they couldn’t reach a doctor immediately. A week later when they reached a doctor a layer of scar tissue had formed on her eye which destroyed her self steam . It was after that when she started to read and write passionately.
Sue Monk Kidd’s childhood inspired her to write the fiction novel, The Secret Life of Bees, from her experiences with racism in the 1960’s. Kidd vividly remembers the summer of 1964 when the Civil Rights Act had been signed and coloured people were allowed to vote. She remembers the cruelty, hate, and injustice towards the African-American people when they wanted to vote. She “found her redemption through writing” walking away from the summer of 1964, as a different person who saw life differently. Kidd had always been exposed to injustice her entire childhood so it seemed like the norm for there to be separation between black and white people.