3 Must-Read Margaret Walker Poems

Margaret Walker was an American novelist born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. She was influenced by authors like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her first collection of poetry, For My People, was published in 1942. She was the first Black woman to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

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For My People

‘For My People’ by Margaret Walker is a poem celebrating African American culture while highlighting several hardships African Americans have faced. The poem urges African Americans in the generations to come to not allow themselves to face the same hardships their ancestors did in the form of systemic racism, sickness, and a general deprivation of rights.

'For My People' is one of the most notable poems of Margaret Walker. It won her the Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards and enabled her to make her mark in the community of worldwide poets as an activist and advocator for equality between whites and blacks.

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

loving freedom come to growth...