"My Idol Was Langston Hughes": The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence

"As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes." Margaret Walker Alexander at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern black women writers, and she recalled how she met Zora, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Her memories of Richard Wright were especially powerful, and I later reminded my students that Wright had lived on Lynch Street—the street that runs through the Jackson State campus—before he moved to Chicago.

Margaret also directed the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center). The Center featured visiting writers, such as Nikki Giovanni, and included a memorable program in which Fannie Lou Hamer both spoke and sang about her struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.

While teaching at Jackson State, my former wife Josette Rossi and I rented a home on Guynes Street—now named Margaret Walker Alexander Street—in one of the first black middle class neighborhoods in Jackson. Margaret lived several doors to the east of our home, and two doors to the west was the home where Medgar Evers lived when he was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith as he returned home to his family on the evening of June 12, 1963. Our neighbors told us about that tragic night and how it was forever etched in their memory.

Margaret was one of three distinguished women writers who lived in Jackson at that time, the other two being Alice Walker and Eudora Welty. Alice was an aspiring young writer who had just finished her novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Margaret encouraged her to pursue her literary career.

Margaret and Eudora often appeared together at literary events in Jackson, and they enjoyed a special friendship for many years as the First Ladies of Jackson's literary world. They each had a circle of close friends in Jackson with whom they created literary salons where conversation and food were shared. Margaret loved to cook, and her journals are filled with references to food.

Included among her close friends and admirers were poets and literary scholars Virgie Brock-Shedd and Jerry Ward, librarians Ernestine Lipscomb and Bernice Bell, Jackson's president of the National Council of Negro Women Jesse B. Mosely, historic preservationist Alferdteen Harrison, literary scholars Jean Clayton and Maryemma Graham, and Alleane Currie, Margaret's devoted friend and administrative assistant. Jesse Mosely later directed the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, where Richard Wright graduated from high school. For many years, Alferdteen Harrison directed the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center at Jackson State and continued Margaret's important work with the current generation. Maryemma Graham teaches in the Department of English at the University of Kansas and is writing an important, long-awaited biography of Margaret.

As a nationally acclaimed writer, Margaret was a celebrity on campus and an important role model for young African American women. Many students at Jackson State were the first in their family to attend college, and they were inspired by Margaret's stature as a distinguished poet and novelist. Her first book of poetry, For My People, was selected by Stephen Vincent Benét for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition award in 1942. Margaret's novel, Jubilee (1966), was based on her grandmother's life as a slave and was often referred to as the black response...