Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944. Her mother, a maid, and her father, a sharecropper, struggled to provide for their family. Alice, the youngest of eight children, did not receive much parental attention. In 1952, When Walker was eight years old, one of her older brothers shot her right eye with a BB gun. Due to financial struggles and a lack of a car, her family failed to get Alice to the doctor until a week after the incident, leaving her partially blind. The inability to get Alice medical care made her resent her father which eventually led to their estrangement.
Due to Alice’s childhood injury, her mother thought it would be more beneficial for Walker to spend her time writing then doing chores. Initially following the incident, Alice felt isolated. She was teased by her peers and misunderstood by her family. She became very shy and spent much of her childhood alone with her writing. Walker describes that when she was “eight or nine or ten, I began to write, and I kept a notebook. My life has had its trials. I learned very early that writing was a way to deal with pain and isolation”. Alice felt safer putting her feelings on paper than saying them out loud so that is what she did. However six years later, a doctor performed a surgery that removed her scar which helped her regain confidence. Walker went on to be both prom queen and valedictorian.
She was awarded a scholarship to Spelman College based on her exemplary writing skills and excellent academic record. Ironically, the very same accident in her childhood which originally threw her for life off track would be what paid for her education. Alice was awarded a rehabilitation scholarship for handicapped students from the state of Georgia. Although neither of her parents were educated past the fifth grade, Alice’s family “really worshiped education” and were proud to send her to a high regarded black women’s college. During her time at Spellman, Walker involved herself as an activist of the Civil Right Movement by working at voter registration and participating in marches and demonstrations. However, ultimately, the officials at Spellman did not support her activism, so she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
At Sarah Lawrence, Walker was one of only a handful of black students, a large change from the predominantly black institutions Alice attended in the past. Being one of the only African Americans at her school made Walker reflect on her experiences at Spelman and the limitations of her education there. This is desplayed in her essay “When I Was a Negro (college student)” in which Alice referres to Spellman as Gatsby College. This paper is a typewritten essay written in 1964-1965 that explores themes such as gender, race, and education in the south. The paper itself has minor markups with corrections but is practically a clean copy of her piece.
Walker explains that besides tuition Gatsby’s primary attributes are “It is a Negro school…It is a Negro school for young ladies…[and] it is less than three hours away from home by bus”. For Walker, the pool of schools she considered attending were small because she didn’t want to attend school outside the state of Georgia and hardly even thought about applying to predominantly white institutions. Her education revolved around convenience and comfort, not what she was actually learning. To this point, Alice was unimpressed by the professors at Gatsby describing “during my two years at Gatsby I cannot recall a single good relationship i had with a Negro teacher….[they] seemed not even remotely interested in my education. It is disheartening that the professors at Gatsby did not take interest in fostering their students’ love of learning. Professors contain such a strong power to act as role models which sounds as though was a wasted opportunity.
Alice describes Gatsby as deeply connected to Anglo-Saxon tradition. Walker explains that “Gatsby young ladies were literally kept behind fences, forbidden to smoke, drink, think about sex before marriage, and were required to never leave camps alone in the evening during their freshman and sophomore years”. College is intended to be a time of exploration and finding oneself which Alice attempted to do under the constraints of the Gatsby lifestyle. Walker became involved in the civil Rights movement and wanted to use her voice to create change. However the institution made this difficult since “when students protested personal restraints ‘too strenuously’ they were asked to withdraw from the college”. It is disappointing that a college would want to silence members of their student body which resulted in Alice and many of her peers feeling “that and organization that would oust a person of value simply because it did not agree with him was not where I was ought to be trying to get an education”. Walker stuck to this and ended up transferring to Sarah Lawrence University after her sophomore year.
Sarah Lawrence did not check the boxes of being an African American college, being all women, or being in state, however, it was there that Alice Walker was able to use her voice to create positive change. A diverse college experience ended up being exactly what Walker needed. Throughout her college years, Alice Walker continued to write and use her voice top address social issues and advocate for change. Her college experience contributed to her development as both a writer and activist and played a significant role in her later work, including her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and her exploration of themes related to race, gender, and education in the American South.In Walker’s first published essay she wrote “”If the Civil Rights Movement is ‘dead,’1 and if it gave us noth else, it gave us each other” making it clear that the movement became a unifying force in her life. The Civil Rights Movement cemented itself as central not only to Walker’s personal life as a young woman but also as a young writer. She has written about the Movement in some of her early poems, in short stories, in essays, and briefly in her first novel. Life experiences from childhood injuries to difficult college experiences have contributed to Alice Walker’s voice as a powerful author and activist.
