Alice Walker, who will celebrate her 80th birthday during Black History Month, is an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer and poet. Her works include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books and several essays and poems.
Though many know Alice Walker for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Color Purple,” she has garnered a reputation as an activist and womanist pioneer. Her dozens of literacy works and advocacy for Black people, women, animals, and Palestinians has a foundation in her rural south upbringing during segregation.
In a 2010 “Democracy Now!” interview, she credited her encounter with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s as an impetus for joining the civil rights movement. Her participation placed her at the 1963 March on Washington and among aspirant Black voters in Georgia and Mississippi. While in Mississippi, Walker served as a consultant for the state Head Start program and worked at the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People.
By the mid-1980s, the womanist movement came to fruition, specifically at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. Walker said that by coining the term womanist, she attempted to unify women of color within the feminist movement and make it more intersectional. The movement also allowed Black women to center their academic and spiritual viewpoints.
As it relates to Walker, the womanist movement further amplified her previous works, including “The Color Purple,” that centered on Black female experiences.
Since its 1982 release, Walker’s novel “The Color Purple,” continues to resonate with audiences today, and has been turned into an Oscar-winning feature film, Tony-winning Broadway musical, and the 2023 musical film is already garnering awards, nominations and critical acclaim.
In a 2023 Vanity Fair article, Oprah Winfrey, who starred in the original film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” and has produced iterations since, credited Walker’s book for sparking personal hope and igniting change.
“From the moment I read the book — that was my story,” said Winfrey, who shares some of the protagonist, Celie’s, tragic background of sexual abuse as a teen. “I couldn’t believe that Alice Walker had actually penned a story about a girl who was going through the same thing that I was going through in my life. Somebody else knew how I felt. I related so much to Celie’s story and found hope.”
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