Introduction

Margaret Walker’s academic, artistic, and activist legacies as a scholar, teacher, and writer are unparalleled. With classic works such as her poem “For My People” and book of poetry by the same name and her genre-launching, neo-slave novel Jubilee, based on the memories of her maternal grandmother, Walker was a tangible connection between Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the diverse group of artists who comprised the Harlem Renaissance and modern black writers like Sonia Sanchez, James Baldwin, Kiese Laymon, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward.

At Jackson State, Margaret Walker was a long-time faculty member in the English Department, and, in 1968, she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. Today, Walker’s Black Studies Institute bears her name and serves as a special collections research center and museum at JSU.

In 2009, the Margaret Walker Center (MWC) launched its first digitized archive from the Margaret Walker Personal Papers, one of the largest manuscript collections of a modern, Black female writer anywhere in the world. Made possible through grant funding from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project utilized the CONTENTdm platform to host roughly 50% of the overall Margaret Walker collection. The centerpiece of the collection included 13,000 handwritten pages from more than 130 of Margaret Walker’s diaries from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Thanks to the support of the Mellon Foundation, the MWC has created a new open-source Omeka S digital archive that is updated to be more searchable and interactive to make these collections fully available to researchers, students, and the general public. Along with the journals, the digital collection includes new items from the Center’s archives as well as Margaret Walker’s correspondence, scrapbooks, serials, subject files, and writing projects, some of which were never published and not available to the public.

Do not hesitate to contact the Margaret Walker Center (mwa@jsmums.edu) with any questions, concerns, and ideas.