Margaret Walker For My People

             Margaret Walker was a poet born in Birmingham, Alabama. As a child of a Methodist minister, her father, and a music teacher, her mother, she was taught philosophy and poetry by both her parents. Walker received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Northwestern University in 1935 and began working with the Federal Writers’ Project the next year. She also received her master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1942. In 1998 while on her final public appearance at the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers' Conference at Chicago State University, Walker was inducted into the African American Literary Hall of Fame. She died later that year from breast cancer.  

            For My People was the title poem, which helped elevate Walker toward success, in her first volume of poems, which won the Yale University Younger Poets award in 1942.

            In the second piece of the poem Walker gives us a sense of the hard work of African Americans during the 1930s. She finishes by saying “never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding,” to me this is saying that they are doing all this hard work and not really gaining anything out of it. By saying “never understanding” she is kind of showing that some people are ignorant and do not realize that all the work they are doing is not really gaining much for them.

            In the third piece of the poem Walker makes a reference to children and lists different things that they might have been doing, essentially all playing. She says they play a variety of things including “Miss Choomby and company.” In an interview about her poems, Walker says that her father said Miss Choomby “is an African word.” She goes on to say, “Miss Ann is the white lady, but Miss Choomby is the black lady. My sister and I played Miss Choomby.” When I read this I was reminded of Native Son when Bigger and Gus “play white” except that Walker is not playing white she is playing black. It is not very odd because people learn who they are at a young age so any kid will pretend to be something that they can relate to a little bit.

            In the sixth piece of the poem Walker mentions “47^th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans,” these are all historically significant places for African American business and music.

Do you think the poem was over all empowering for African Americans?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xLufZOeziw