In support of #BlackHERstory Month, we’ll be posting about one current black feminist leader or organization each weekday in February. Tune in daily to learn more about black women’s history, feminism, and the reproductive justice movement!
Alice Walker is an internationally acclaimed writer, poet, and human rights activist whose work includes several novels, short stories, children’s books, essays, and poetry. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award for her novel, The Color Purple, and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2006.
Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the 1960’s and credits him for her decision to return to the South as a civil rights activist. She participated in the 1963 March on Washington and later volunteered to registered black voters in Georgia and Mississippi. Walker has been deeply involved in the Gaza-Israeli conflict and travelled to Gaza in 2009 to meet with NGOs and residents and to work with Israel and Egypt to open borders with Gaza. She has faced much criticism for her controversial support of divestment and boycott of the Israeli Government. Walker, however, has noted that she is not anti-Jew or anti-Israel but she is anti-Israeli Government. In fact, Walker was previously married to a Jewish civil rights lawyer and they were the first married inter-racial couple in the state of Mississippi.
