This Is My Century: The Life and Legacy of Margaret Walker

FAIN: GE-254068-17

Jackson State University (Jackson, MS 39217-0001)
Robert Luckett (Project Director: August 2016 to March 2021)

Development of a traveling exhibition, a digital exhibition, and public programs on the life and cultural influence of writer Margaret Walker (1915–98).

Born to educated, talented parents in Birmingham in 1915, Margaret Walker—novelist, poet, and scholar—would have been 100 on July 7, 2015. Her precedent-setting book Jubilee, which turns 50 in 2016, was the first neo-slave novel, paving the way for Roots and Beloved, and her poem For My People and book by the same name garnered the first national writing prize for an African American. Soon to celebrate its 50th anniversary, founded in 1968, the Margaret Walker Center proposes This Is My Century: The Life and Legacy of Margaret Walker a $39,600 planning grant, to produce narratives and design plans for traveling and digital exhibitions to accompany independent programming by schools, local libraries, and other organizations. With seven main humanities themes identified by scholars, the grant will allow the team to more fully develop how those themes will be conveyed to audiences, and it will produce plans for outreach, marketing, and evaluation of the final exhibitions.