Preview

Alice Walker Influences

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
482 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Alice Walker Influences
“Do not wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you got to make yourself (Quotina 2015)”. Alice Walker is an African American author and activist. Walker is best known for her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award- Winning Novel, The Color Purple (Famous Birthdays 2015) Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s and worked in Mississippi as a Civil Rights activist during that time (Biography 2015). Walker influenced society in a positive way as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and with her poems, stories and quotes. Walker quotes and stories influenced a lot of African Americans in a positive manner.
A novelist, poet and feminist, Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was a Social Worker, teacher and lecturer. Walker took part in the 1960’s Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. She also won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the novel “The Color Purple” in 1982. Walker is one of the most admired African Americans writers today.

In Walkers early childhood, Walker suffered a serious injury. She was shot in the right eye with a BB pellet while playing with two of her brothers. The mark on her eye made her become self conscious. After the incident, Walker withdrew from the world. “For a long
…show more content…
Walker was a writer in residence for Jackson State College and Tugaloo College. Walker became active in the Civil Rights movement; fought for equality for all African Americans. Scholars and Critics believed that Alice is a very important person. She wrote numerous of types of literature. Walker married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a white civil rights attorney. They lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where she worked as the black history consultant for a Head Start program (Alice Walker 2013). In 1969, the year her daughter Rebecca Grant was born, she also completed her first novel, “Third Life of Grange

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Anne Moody (born September 15 1940) is an African American author who has written about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and then joining the Civil Rights Movement, which fought racism against blacks in the United States beginning in the 1950s.…

    • 3760 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the 1800’s, women’s rights, dress reform and suffrage had begun to really become a global issue. Mary Edwards Walker was a women’s right activist and several other things including, a nurse and later a surgeon in the Civil War, a writer, an abolitionist and a feminist. During her lifetime, she accomplished many extraordinary achievements, including being awarded The Congressional Medal of Honor for her service during the war. She was the first and only woman as of 2015 to have been awarded this Medal of Honor. Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26th, 1832 and raised in Oswego, New York.…

    • 876 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Life of Shirley Chisholm

    • 3452 Words
    • 14 Pages

    She started her work career as a Director of a day nursery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This experience gave her an acute awareness of her social surroundings. She saw first-hand how minorities were in substandard housing, inadequate schools, subjected to drugs and police brutality and no basic civil rights. This was when she determined that bad government had a connection to the fate of these minorities. She joined the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League and gained lots of experience and political insight. She helped her neighbors to register to vote, unemployed to get jobs, students to get scholarships and fought with the league for 10 years and gained lots of respect and connections.…

    • 3452 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alice Paul's Suffrage

    • 186 Words
    • 1 Page

    Born in 1885 in New Jersey, Alice Paul was raised into an intellectual and religious family. She was the leader of American woman suffrage who introduced the first equal rights amendment campaign in the United States. Paul planned marches, White House protests, and rallies which resulted in her detention three times before the approval of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. In 1923, Paul drafted and had introduced into Congress the first equal rights amendment to the Constitution, but the Congress didn’t approve it. Since her amendment failed to pass she turned her concentration on international forum and she got the support of League of Nations then she got a place in the Woman’s Research Foundation. In 1938 she created and represented the World…

    • 186 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The Color Purple” is an epistolary novel by Alice Walker exploring the life of Celie through letters to God and her sister Nettie.…

    • 548 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Rosa Parks was born on Feb.4,1913 in Tuskegee,Ala. Rosa parks was one important part of the civil rights movement. She wanted for all black people to be treated the same as white people.…

    • 195 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Madam Walker Obstacles

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages

    She lived her life to the absolute last day. She worked hard and perceived into her best. Walker pushed through obstacles made to stop her. Once she became a millionaire she didn't shy away from the black community, she helped them. Not only did she give help the black community, she gave black women a voice by providing jobs to the people who needed them. Walker did not shy away from her hardship, in fact she embraced them. At the National Negro Business League Convention in July, 1912, Walker said: "I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground." Walker is easily one the most inspirational people of the early nineteen hundreds. She demanded a voice and she got…

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Walker blooming into a young woman, what was the role African woman during the Civil Rights Movement? “ Woman suffrage had a historically been middle class movement, but at this time meeting wage-earning women…Still no woman of color was invited to attend” (DuBois & Dumenil, 2016). The growing power of the women’s suffrage movement reposed both on women’s collective consciousness, born in female sodalities, and on incremented individualism among women in an urbanizing, industrializing economy. Even though black women had assumed an essential part in the development, they frequently got little acknowledgment for such committed support. Inside neighborhood groups, black women served as boss hotspots for the preparation of individuals and development capital; without such parts, the development would have been significantly hindered. Proficient of black women's commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. The position of black female activists as extension pioneers of various sorts demonstrates that they were dynamic pioneers. The assembly of individuals and assets in black groups by these extension pioneers achieved social change, changing racial mistreatment into social…

    • 828 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alice Childress’ works are important for the African American community, especially Florence and Wine in the Wilderness. They both show the struggles of African Americans then and now. These two phenomenal works will forever impact the community. Their timeless themes will never get old and will always give future generations something to think…

    • 1557 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Most commonly known for her work, The Color Purple, Alice Walker has been a prominent figure in both the African American and American community. Born on February 9, 1933 in Putnam County, Georgia, Walker, in many of her pieces, covers the telling experience during the Jim Crow Era. As the youngest of eight, family had been a major factor in her life. Her parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker were very hardworking people who tried their best to provide their children with a sense of pride and responsibility. While her had father worked as a sharecropper, Walker’s mother worked seventeen hour shifts as a maid to help send Alice to college.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    It is significant that Alice Walker—poet, novelist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction—…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alice Malsenior Walker was born February 9, 1944, in Putnam county located in Eatonton Georgia. Struggles of being a black woman in the 1960’s and a childhood accident would eventually help her write her most famous book The Color Purple. She would also go on to attempt to thank her brother for giving her confidence and courage to follow her dreams but he died before she had chance. Alice Walker’s work has made her an acclaimed book and poem writer. Alice’s work in both the civil rights movement in the 60’s and her inspiring books, have a huge impact on her present day career and overall accomplishments.…

    • 674 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Black women in the last 100-200 years have been oppressed and mistreated. After going through the Civil War, they were free from their white masters, but not all young girls were free from their parents or husbands that treated them poorly. Alice Walker was a famous African-American woman who wrote the book The Color Purple and the short story “Everyday Use”. She showed examples of oppression of black women in both.…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Jennifer Lopez

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Alice Walker believes that even though slavery ended women were still fighting like men to be treated equally. For example she said " How they battered down doors and ironed starched white shirts". Meaning women did the same as men, but didn't receive enough credit or equal rights for what women did as men did. Another metaphor is " A place for us how they knew what we must know without knowing a page of it themselves". This means they knew what the others knew without being told themselves. The strategy she uses to covey her…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Walker has also won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple. Among the different genres, “Walker writes about her roots in rural Georgia, her experiences as a black woman, and the political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s.” (David) Walker published two books comprised of short stories. There titles: In Love and Trouble herein (L&T) and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down herein (Good Woman). Many of the main characters in these stories are left unnamed; this offers the reader the opinion that the unnamed character is Alice Walker herself. Critic Alice Hall Petry discusses the differences between the short stories in Walkers L&T and her stories in Good Woman, asserting that the stories in the first collection are much stronger that those in the second. (Petry) The works contained in L&T, are stories of 13 women who were mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful and magnificent, trying to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives. (Winchell) I am focusing my paper around several stories that are in L&T. The theme throughout these stories is; women persevered from the violent…

    • 2803 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays