SOURCE: Baraka, Amiri. “Margaret Walker Alexander.” Nation 26, no. 1 (4 January 1999): 32-3.

In the following essay, delivered at New York University following Walker's death, Baraka emphasizes her unique contributions to American literature.

You cannot even spell here without her. First, Margaret Walker, Margaret Walker Alexander. She was one of the greatest writers of the language. She was the grandest expression of the American poetic voice and the ultimate paradigm of the Afro-American classic literary tradition. Margaret Walker Alexander was the living continuum of the great revolutionary democratic arts culture that has sustained and inspired the Afro-American people since the middle passage.

Hers is an American art, but an art deeply rooted in the actual life and history and feelings of the African chattel slaves, transformed by the obscene experience of slavery, from human to “real estate,” as DuBois shocks us into understanding in Black Reconstruction in America. Many were suffering...