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The Review of Black Political Economy

Erschienen in:

11.12.2015

The Greatest Art is The Greatest Propaganda: the Fascinating and Tragic Life of Margaret Walker Alexander

verfasst von: Jelani M. Favors

Erschienen in: The Review of Black Political Economy | Ausgabe 2/2016

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Abstract

In 1949, the famed author and poet Margaret Walker took a position of employment with the English Department at Jackson State University, an appointment that she would hold for the next 30 years. Her tenure at Jackson State coincided with the rise of the Modern Civil Rights Movement and her diary entries during these turbulent years illustrate a woman in flux and tragically silenced as the black freedom struggle unfolded. This article discusses Walker’s dilemma as it related to feeling voiceless in Mississippi’s closed society but it also examines the ways in which Walker molded her students and in doing so, made contributions to their politicization and development as change agents. Walker’s career would become a source of inspiration for later artists and writers of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements.

Vorheriger Artikel A Policy Framework for Economic and Social Liberation: The Policy Mandala

Nächster Artikel India’s Color Complex: One Day’s Worth of Matrimonials

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The Institute for Colored Youth was founded in 1837 with the financial backing of Richard Humphreys, a white Quaker who reserved in his will a financial allotment to be used for the creation of an educational institute for “the descendants of the African race.” The school moved from Philadelphia to Cheyney, Pennsylvania in 1903, was renamed the Cheyney Training School for Teachers in 1914, and renamed the State Teachers College at Cheyney in 1933. The institution is now known as Cheyney State University. Other historically black colleges have laid claim to the title of first black college, citing that Cheyney was founded as a training and normal school and not a four year, degree granting institution. Among those institutions who lay claim to the title of first, are Lincoln University, founded in 1854 as Ashmun Institute and Wilberforce University founded in 1856. The latter was actually the first institution of higher education to be owned and operated by African Americans, whereas it was a creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The author recognizes Cheyney State University as the first black college based upon its founding date and its later evolution into a four year, degree granting institution. Additionally, the work being assigned to early students at the ICY, was on par with a number of degree granting, white only colleges at that time. For more detailed history on the founding of Cheyney and its institutional history, see Charline Howard Conyers, A Living Legend: The History of Cheyney University, 1837-1951 (Cheyney: Cheyney University Press, 1990).

Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: The University of Illinois Pess, 1980), 19.

Margaret Walker Alexander, interview by Ann Allen Shockley, Fisk University Special Collections, July 18, 1973.

There are several studies that examine the freedom struggle and the contributions of black college students. As excellent as these studies are, most of them center on the relationship forged through the arduous fieldwork and day-to-day organizing that took place as the movement unfolded. Few focus on the legacy of idealism and race consciousness embodied in black college life that greatly aided in producing SNCC, CORE, and NAACP activists of the 1960s. See August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkely: University of California Press, 1995) John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1995); David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998); Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

For more on the founding of Jackson State University see, Lelia Gaston Rhodes, Jackson State University: The First Hundred Years, 1877-1977 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979).

For more on the historic role of the black church and the unique interpretation of Christianity by African Americans in the freedom struggle see, Howard Thurman, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (Richmond: Friends United Press, 1975); Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Wyatt Tee Walker, Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1979); Hans A. Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984); James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986); C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Milton C. Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, July 22, 1949, Box 5, Folder #34, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, September 27, 1949, Box 5, Folder #36, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

While informative, the Jacob L. Reddix papers were also unprocessed at the time of the author’s perusal. Nevertheless, information such as correspondence from former students and evidence of laudatory praise from those who admired his economic theories were/are available in Reddix’s papers. See Jacob L. Reddix Papers, Jackson State University Archives.

Jacob Reddix was the first president to preside over Jackson College after the state assumed control of the institution in 1940, ending 63 years of control by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. The ABHMS noted that Tougaloo College was adequately meeting the educational needs of African Americans in the area, therefore relinquishing their financial support for Jackson College. His personal papers, while unprocessed, are valuable source materials that display a black college administrator in flux as the state of Mississippi exerted greater control on both him and the institution. For more on the transition of Jackson College to state control see Jacob L. Reddix, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: The Memoirs of Jacob L. Reddix (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1974) and Lelia Rhodes, Jackson State University: The First Hundred Years (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1979). See also the Jacob L. Reddix Papers, Jackson State University Archives.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, January 12, 1950, Box 5, Folder #38, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

A wave of migration and a developing labor and civil rights movement raised tensions within white America during the first half of the twentieth century. This set off housing riots and racial violence but also deepened African Americans’ commitment to the burgeoning freedom struggles in the second half of the century. For more on this development see, David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton and Company, 2008); Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, October 9, 1955, Box 9, Folder #51, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, October 9, 1955, Box 9, Folder #51, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Alexander’s own life may have had some bearing on the main character Vyry, in her acclaimed novel, Jubilee. In the novel, Vyry makes the conscious decision to not escape the horrors of slavery in order to remain with her family. See, Margaret Walker Alexander, Jubilee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, August 12, 1957, Box 9, Folder #53, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center

“This I Believe,” The Blue and White Flash, March 1956, Jackson State University Archives.

“Moving Forward to Serve Humanity,” The Blue and White Flash, May 1949, Jackson State University Archives.

“Join the Youth Council,” and “Jackson College Represented at NAACP Conference,” The Blue and White Flash, November 1942, Jackson State University Archives; “College Represented at Youth Congress,” The Blue and White Flash, December 1946, Jackson State University Archives; “Moving Forward to Serve Humanity,” The Blue and White Flash, May 1949, Jackson State University Archives.

Dittmer, Local People, 225.

Interview with Gloria Douglas, 7/31/05.

Interview with Rita Kinard, 7/31/05.

Interview with Gloria Douglas 7/31/05.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, June 24, 1958, Box 9, Folder #54, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, July 9, 1961, Box 10, Folder #61, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, May 1, 1960, Box 10, Folder #58, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

“Jackson State College Students Stage Protest,” Clarion Ledger, March 28, 1961.

Interview with Dorie Ladner, June 23, 2004.

“Jackson State College Students Stage Protest,” Clarion Ledger, March 28, 1961.

Jacob L. Reddix to Albert Jones, April 1, 1961, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Files, Mississippi.

Interview with Dorie Ladner, June 23, 2004.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, February 1964, Box 11, Folder #68, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Margaret Walker Alexander, journal entry, July 28, 1963, Box 11, Folder #69, Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center.

Derrick White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 59 & 65.

Titel: The Greatest Art is The Greatest Propaganda: the Fascinating and Tragic Life of Margaret Walker Alexander
verfasst von: Jelani M. Favors
Publikationsdatum: 11.12.2015
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: The Review of Black Political Economy / Ausgabe 2/2016
Print ISSN: 0034-6446
Elektronische ISSN: 1936-4814
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-015-9223-4

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