walker

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

Alice Walker Breaks Out As One Of The Leading Female Voices In African American Literature

An African American writer and activist Alice Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960's. Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropper parents, she knew racism and poverty only too well and with works expressing the need for the tackling of such issues she has become one of the best-known and most highly respected writers from the U.S. along with such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor , commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women's literature. Her activism started after being educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, where Walker, in a commencement speech spoke out against the silence of that institution's curriculum to African-American culture and history. Act...

Netflix’s ‘Self-Made’ miniseries about Madam C.J. Walker leaves out the mark she made through generosity

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TELEVISION, VIDEO REELS

Netflix’s ‘Self-Made’ miniseries about Madam C.J. Walker leaves out the mark she made through generosity

The Netflix series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker” brings to life part of a fascinating rags-to-riches tale I’ve been researching for the past 10 years. Walker, widely documented to have been America’s first self-made female millionaire, made her fortune building an Indianapolis-based beauty products company that served black women across the U.S. and overseas. Today it offers a product line through Sephora. Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer stars in the miniseries about the African American entrepreneur originally named Sarah Breedlove. Born shortly after emancipation in 1867 on a cotton plantation in Louisiana to a formerly enslaved family, she later adapted the initials and last name of her third husband – played by Blair Underwood in the series. The show imagines Wa...

How Civil Rights Leader Wyatt Tee Walker Revived Hope After MLK’s Death

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

How Civil Rights Leader Wyatt Tee Walker Revived Hope After MLK’s Death

Four years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the novelist James Baldwin would write on the pages of Esquire magazine, “Since Martin’s death, in Memphis, and that tremendous day in Atlanta, something has altered in me, something has gone away.” Baldwin wrote about how “the act of faith” – that is, his belief that the movement would change white Americans and ultimately America – maintained him through the years of the black freedom movement, through marches and petitions and torturous setbacks. After King’s death, Baldwin found it hard to keep that faith. Nearly two weeks after King’s funeral, in April of 1968, King’s confidant and former strategist Wyatt Tee Walker tried to renew this faith. Drawing on a tradition of black faith, Walker encouraged a grieving communit...

14Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

Alice Walker Breaks Out As One of the Leading Female Voices in African American Literature

An African American writer and activist Alice Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960's. Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropper parents, she knew racism and poverty only too well and with works expressing the need for the tackling of such issues she has become one of the best-known and most highly respected writers from the U.S. along with such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor , commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women's literature. Her activism started after being educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, where Walker, in a commencement speech spoke out against the silence of that institution's curriculum to African-American culture and history. Act...