Alice Walker

Fine artist, Alice Walker is an African American author and feminist, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropper parents. Alice is one of the best-known and most highly respected writers in the U.S. Educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College. In continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi. In 1965, Walker met and later married Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi. This brought them a steady stream of harassment and even murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter, Rebecca, and divorced in 1976. Active in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the South, she used her own and others' experiences as material for her searing examination of politics and black-white relations in her novels. Her works typically focus on the struggles of African Americans, particularly women, and their struggle against a racist, sexist, and violent society. Alice also focuses on the role of women of color in culture and history. Walker is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as a matter of principle.