Walker Refuses To Be Forgotten; Emory Archive Preserves Memory | The Emory Wheel

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker has always been passionate about documenting history, whether it’s hanging on to her own mementos or researching earlier black authors. Therefore, it should come to no surprise that Walker’s personal papers, the newest addition to The Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library’s African American Collection, take up more than 120 crates. The archive showcases a life spent struggling to represent the long drowned-out voices of African Americans and represents Walker’s own desire that she not be forgotten. Walker’s interest in preserving the records of her own life began early. A battered high school transcript is one of the oldest documents currently on display. Along side her high school transcript lies her college diploma from Sarah Lawrence College where she transferred after attending Spelman College in Atlanta for two years. Later, Walker began working on research to shed more light on earlier African American writers. One of her projects was a biography of the famous Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. A personal card from Hughes sits among Walker’s artifacts at Emory as a testament to the friendship between the two writers. Scrawling in green marker, Hughes congratulates Walker on her marriage to civil-rights lawyer Mel Leventhal and thanks her for some oranges she sent him. Walker had a particular passion for restoring the history of black women, stemming from her own struggles to make her way in life as a black woman. An example of this is her work researching the pioneering author Zora Neal Hurston, during which she recovered famous literary works by the author and made a pilgrimage to her unmarked grave in Florida. Currently on display in Walker’s archive is a receipt for Hurston’s tombstone which Walker paid to have placed over the site. Walker first coined the term “womanist,” a term that Walker differentiates from the concept of a feminist in that “womanist” encompasses more identification of views and experiences of women of color. Walker expressed those womanist ideals in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, her most famous literary work and the main focal point of the archives on display. A copy of the novel including Alice Walker’s own personal revisions marked in blue colored pencil sits in the display. Now, years after The Color Purple was first published, Walker still enjoys success as a writer, putting out such books as Possessing of the Secret Joy and Meridian. One of her latest projects has been finding a permanent home for the mountain of materials pertaining to her life that she had meticulously saved. There are many undiscovered crevices in Walker’s archives, which library directors say will take close to a year to fully process. Among the documents currently on display is a ripped piece of Ms. Magazine stationery, on which Walker scrawled a reminder to herself about the importance of documentation. “People are known by the records they keep,” Walker wrote. “If it isn’t in the records it will be said it didn’t happen.” — Contact Brandi Wilson