Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, a well educated minister, and mother, a music teacher, provided an environment in which their daughter thrived. Walker completed her B.A. at Northwestern University (Illinois) when she was only nineteen, and while living in Chicago, she was affiliated with several important writing groups. During the depression, she worked for the Federal Writers' Project and contributed a dialect piece, "Yalluh Hammuh," whose folk hero would later appear in For My People (1942). As a member of the South Side Writers Group, Walker was a close colleague of Richard Wright. Walker completed her M.A. at the University of Iowa by writing For My People, a work for which she later became the first African American to win the Yale Younger Poets award.

For My People also establishes Walker as a key player in the tradition of American female activist poets who used their work to champion marginal groups. Like Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Joy Davidman, and Muriel Rukeyser, Walker challenges a socio-economic hierarchy by advocating a more equitable system for disadvantaged people. Walker, however, gives her poetry a different twist by showcasing African Americans as emblems of the working class. She also broaches the controversial issue of using revolution or non-violence to effect change and in the last analysis opts for the latter. For My People consists of three parts, each of which is written in a different verse form: free verse, folk narratives in the ballad tradition, and sonnets. Part I is the beginning of a middle class female's bildungsroman that collapses class distinctions as the speaker aligns herself with different groups of common Blacks and discovers her vocation as a political poet. As she imaginatively interacts with these people, they provide the impetus for her development, and as her vision matures, they become more powerful. Thus, the speaker and the groups reciprocate and augment each other's growth, a dynamic illustrated by the following sequence of poems.

In "Southern Song" and "Sorrow Home," the speaker expresses her longing for the South which she re-visions as a place of freedom and beauty for African Americans. Because she has freed up emotionally, she has the capacity to imagine herself and Black field hands as courageous, self-sufficient people taking back the land that they believe is theirs ("Delta"). Although this vision initially exhilarates the speaker, it also causes her to take stock of her actual character. In "Lineage," she realizes that she lacks the strength of her grandmothers who, even though they stoop and follow plows, are robust women who bring the land to fruition. Moreover, the emotional strength of their singing complements that of their bodies, and their uttering "clean words" implies a wisdom consisting of moral truth and its practical application in daily affairs. By admitting that she lacks her grandmothers' strength, the speaker acknowledges these women as role models, and in "Since 1619," she begins emulating them within the parameters of her own experience. She scrutinizes her life by admitting her complicity in her people's oppression and then poses questions about wisdom that aggressively reshape her grandmothers' practical and moral virtues:

When will I see my brother's face wearing another color?
When will I be ready to die in an honest fight?
When will I be conscious of the struggle--now to do or die?
When will these scales fall away from my eyes?

What will I say when days of wrath descend:
When the money-gods take all my life away:
When the death knell sounds
And peace is a flag of far-flung blood and filth? (5-12)

The speaker not only emphasizes her need for practical knowledge that will enable her to assess people and events, but she also questions if she has the courage to remain faithful to her own group when she is tested. If her mettle is sufficient, she will emulate the Black defenders in "Delta" and like her grandmothers "utter clean words." When the speaker resolves to challenge tyrants, she claims both kinds of virtues. Because the speaker's imagined perceptions progressively empower herself and poorer Blacks, she gradually closes the gap between different classes of African Americans and vows to become a political poet who will defend all marginal people regardless of their race.

In Part II, Walker also ensures that the Black community does not replicate a socio-economic hierarchy that privileges status or wealth by interrupting her speaker's journey with a series of folk narratives that give voice to less educated Blacks. These tales are related by speakers whose speech patterns range from virtually replicating standard English to a vernacular that B. Dilla Buckner describes as subject-verb disagreement, dropping auxiliary verbs, and using double subjects and folk pronunciation ("Folkloric Elements in Margaret Walker's Poetry" 375). These tales have further political repercussions because Walker encodes revolutionary actions in the behavior of people who are physically small, but who exert immense energy or strength. However, Walker emphasizes that human beings are still vulnerable because character flaws can thwart them or because they cannot completely control any situation. Although Walker lauds the folk for their bravery, martial abilities, and quick wits, her caveats are important because they imply that the revolution lauded in "For My People" and "Delta" must yield to non-violent behavior.

For example, the speaker who relates how Stagolee killed a policeman augments the hero's prowess by referring to his facility with knives and his escaping a lynch mob. By emphasizing that "nobody knows how Stagolee dies," he suggests that Stagolee defied the dominant culture by avoiding all attempts at apprehension and punishment, and then he makes him a supernatural figure whose ghost haunts "Old Man River" around New Orleans. Other forceful characters such as Kissie Lee and Trigger Slim confront the power structure, or tricksters such as May and Poppa Chicken outwit others or beat the system at its own game. However, Walker tempers their potency with defeated figures who fail to channel their energy in constructive ways or who are overcome by life which just is more powerful than any human being: Gus, a lineman who handles live wires and survives electrocutions, dies of drunkenness when he falls into a river and drowns, and Big John Henry, who has immense physical strength and conjuring powers, is killed in a freak accident when a ten pound hammer falls on him and splits him in two. These real world limitations suggest that unlike the mythological Stagolee, human beings--including revolutionaries--are not invincible and can be killed. Because violence would exact too high a price on African Americans and by extension all working class people, the middle class speaker reappears in Part III and embraces peaceful means to change the status quo. Especially in "Our Need" and "The Struggle Staggers Us," she advocates a community of people who accept each other and actualize the moral and practical virtues of her grandmothers: Courageous, honest and reflective people who devise ways that ensure a better life for others are her alternative to revolutionaries.

Although For My People is a first book, the well crafted poems and carefully thought out politics establish the work in its own right and also signal the productive career that Walker would create. She married Firnist James Alexander in 1943 and remained professionally active until her death on November 30, 1998. After teaching at various Black colleges, Walker accepted a position at Jackson State College (now University) in 1949 where she taught until her retirement. At Jackson, she also founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People which has been renamed in her honor. During the 1940s and 1950s, Walker researched and drafted a Civil War novel that she completed as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa (1962-65) and which was published as Jubilee in 1966. Walker then returned to poetry. Prophets for a New Day (1970) was her contribution to the civil rights movement, and it was followed by a small volume, October Journey (1973) and an anthology of verse, This Is My Country: New and Collected Poems (1988). In A Poetic Equation (1974) Walker and Nikki Giovanni collaborated in discussions of literary and political issues. Walker continued mastering different genres, this time with the biography The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Works (1987). To date Maryemma Graham has edited several volumes of critical essays that Walker wrote throughout her career: How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990) and On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997).