Alice Walker Interview: Joining The Civil Rights Movement & Writing 'The Color Purple'

Upbringing in the Jim Crow South

Alice Walker reflects on growing up in a Jim Crow, segregated South. She describes how her parents’ love and creativity existed alongside extreme racial oppression enforced through:

• Terror and violence
• Sharecropping
• Systematic deprivation

Walker explains that white dominance trained Black people to suppress themselves, while laws and brutality—such as beatings, lynchings, disappearances, and rape—maintained segregation.

She compares sharecropping to “slavery with a new name,” emphasizing the harsh realities faced by Black families, including:

• Lack of medical care
• Brutal, unsafe housing conditions
• The annual threat of being forced off the land

The Shaping of Character by Her Parents

Walker credits her mother and father as central to her formation.

Her mother

Her mother’s artistry and thoughtfulness created beauty amid poverty through practices like:

• Quilts
• Gardens
• Scavenging flowers
• Making do with little

Her mother also carried Cherokee-rooted knowledge, including the use of medicinal plants.

Her father

Although limited by poverty and education, her father was politically active and intellectually inclined. Walker highlights that he became the first Black man to vote in her county—despite threats of death. She suggests this activism made their family targets, contributing to forced moves into increasingly horrific housing.

Walker also draws a broader lesson from their lives: her parents demonstrate that women can be as competent as men.

Storytelling, Language, and Identity

Walker presents storytelling and language as foundational to her development. Both parents told imaginative tales, and she inherits Black folk traditions—such as (“Uncle Remus” stories)—along with nicknaming practices that captured personality traits.

She shares details about her own nickname (“kitten”) and describes gender fluidity in her family during childhood—at least until oppression hardened her father’s beliefs. Later, she discusses how racism affected his sense of power, while reaffirming the significance of women’s agency and capability.

Early Reading and Writing

Walker traces her creative drive back to childhood:

• Writing in the margins of a Sears/Roebuck catalog using a twig
• Drawing as a young student
• Finding books through discarded literature and encouragement from teachers

Poetry is described as especially important to her moral outlook, including ideas such as:

• Living so you can “live with yourself”
• “Stories chase you” and must be told by those uniquely positioned to tell them
• The importance of fidelity to lived speech

Trauma, Psychological Strain, and Staying Grounded

Walker connects personal trauma to her activism and themes as a writer. She recounts an eye injury at age eight, which:

• Isolated her socially (staring and teasing)
• Left lasting difference within her family’s pain

She also stresses that oppression creates psychological strain across generations. To stay centered, she emphasizes disciplined practices such as:

• Meditation
• Writing
• Painting
• Dance

These practices help prevent the soul from being overrun by daily hostility.

Path into the Civil Rights Movement

Walker describes beginning civil rights organizing after encountering injustice in both school and labor settings. Examples include:

• Working as a “salad girl” for a white 4-H club on land connected to Native American dispossession
• Protesting unequal treatment in school transportation

She recounts choosing to sit in the front of a bus and being forced to the back. Rather than retreat, she decides to keep going to school and to join civil rights organizing immediately.

Her organizing includes:

• Sit-ins
• Marches
• Voter registration

She describes working in Liberty County and later in Mississippi.

Leaving for Africa and Building a New Understanding

Walker broadens her journey by leaving for Africa to “learn who I was,” rejecting racist myths that portrayed Black people as “savages.”

In Kenya, she helps build a school amid colonial dispossession, where:

• Land is converted into pineapples
• Original inhabitants are pushed into small shacks
• Basic wellbeing is denied

She explains that this groundedness helped her begin her first novel, allowing her to see Africans as fully human rather than as caricatures.

Documenting Civil Rights Through Story and Law

Returning to Mississippi, Walker describes documenting civil rights work using depositions from sharecroppers targeted similarly to her own family. She emphasizes that:

• Legal strategies matter
• Storytelling can support court cases

Marriage, Love, and Political Life

Walker presents her marriage as a fusion of love and political life. She notes that desegregation happened partly due to their interracial presence, alongside persistent harassment, including Klan threats. She also includes surreal bureaucratic experiences—such as the “question mark” on their daughter’s birth record.

While she acknowledges fear fluctuates under pressure, she insists love and commitment stayed constant.

The Genesis of The Color Purple

A major section explains how The Color Purple emerged. Walker says she wanted more time with her grandparents after an injury, writing specifically to:

• “Give them a voice”
• Preserve their speech and experiences from erasure

She describes the novel as growing from simmering family stories, especially the “pink panties” tale—connecting it to:

• Female solidarity
• Longing
• Dignity amid hardship

Walker also emphasizes the need for safe writing spaces. She relocated and searched for the right environment because she never felt safe in the South.

For her, the book’s core purpose is to remind readers that even under extreme suffering, life can remain magical and possible. She connects this idea to what she learned visiting Kalaupapa, a leper colony, where a man believed happiness could survive the worst circumstances.

Civil Rights and Feminism as Inseparable

Walker situates her work at the intersection of civil rights and feminism, arguing that:

• Women’s rights are human rights
• Women’s oppression cannot be separated from broader struggles for justice

She describes her later involvement with women’s issues through her work as a writer/editor, including connections to Gloria Steinem and work at Ms. magazine. She also focuses on misogyny across cultures, including the theme of female genital mutilation as control.

Walker identifies as a “womanist” (a feminist of color), distinguishing her framework from predominantly white second-wave feminism. She argues oppression and misogyny intersect across:

• Race
• Gender
• Power structures

Critique of feminism’s remaining failures

Walker criticizes ongoing cultural fear of femininity and the tendency to deny it—for example, calling women “guys.” She views this as erasing identity.

She defines “female” not narrowly as motherhood, but as the capacity to create life and connect to the earth—while insisting women should not be confined to a single role.

Education, Historical Truth, and America’s Instability

Finally, Walker reflects broadly on education, historical truth, and America’s instability. She argues that people need accurate historical structures—history beyond fantasy—to understand who they are and how injustice shaped the nation.

Without that foundation, lies undermine stability even psychologically. She links this directly to writing as a corrective: sharing how America actually operates and how identities were formed through oppression.

Presenters/Contributors - Alice Walker - Interviewer (name not provided in subtitles)