Margaret Walker’s “For My People”

The scope of Margaret Walker’s “For My People” is so expansive in its address to Americans that it could be a U.S. president’s inaugural poem; its emotional appeal results in an intimacy rich enough to speak to the everyday experience of life in the United States. Margaret Walker’s poem addresses marginalized and disenfranchised people and endeavors to show the light that exists within and despite their lives. 

Walker’s parents were university-educated Southerners; her grandmother told her stories about her own mother’s “slavery time” at Walker’s urging. Walker moved to Chicago to attend her father’s alma mater, Northwestern University, and earned her bachelor’s degree by age 19. Her master’s thesis through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop won the Yale Younger Poets Prize when she was 26 years old, making her the first African American to win the prize. The 1930s were a decade of education for Walker, but she learned within the socioeconomic contexts of racism, segregation, the Great Depression, the Great Migration of Black Southerners northward, and Chicago’s Black Renaissance of cultural and artistic vitalization. Walker had one foot in academia and the other foot in the world-as-it-was, and this duality shines through her poetry. 

Walker discovered a community of Black writers in Chicago, a city that supported an arts scene as lively as that in Harlem, New York. She was a member of the South Side Writers Group, where she solidified her friendships with writers, including Richard Wright and Arna Bontemps. She also worked on the Federal Writers’ Project, a branch of the Work Projects Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and taught from 1949 to 1979 at what is known today as Jackson State University, a prominent, historically Black college. 

Walker’s first book, For My People, was published in 1942. She had early and certain success as a writer, an educator, and an activist, but the world-as-it-was was not simple and was “no crystal stair,” as Langston Hughes wrote in his poem “Mother to Son.” Hughes, the famed Harlem Renaissance poet, was an early supporter of Walker’s writing. The book’s titular poem, “For My People,” is a personal designation. The possessive my brings readers close to the speaker of the poem and sets an intimate tone. If the poem’s title was “For a People,” readers would begin in an impersonal context. Because Walker is a Black woman of a generation in the throes of racial violence and inequity, readers understand that her people are Black people, and this poem is for her people. 

The poem functions using the form of a list in each stanza. Walker’s use of repetition and slant rhyme within these lists gives the poem constant forward motion while the level of diction forces readers to read the text with patience. The result is that each stanza conveys facets of Black life while offering readers time to ponder and understand them. This effect is particularly felt when reading the poem aloud. The music of the poem softens its sorrows as does Walker’s intimate knowledge that sorrows are primarily discernible when they coexist with joy. 

The first stanza is grounded in the “slave stories” Walker learned from her grandmother, but notice that despite the “dirges and their ditties and their blues” and “prayers nightly to an unknown god,” Walker also recognizes “singing … and ditties … and jubilees.” There is lightness within these downtrodden lives! 

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power;

The second stanza demonstrates a feature of play that reappears throughout the poem; Walker omits select commas to enhance the pace and musical effect of lists on readers. The present tense and length of the list also cultivates an opportunity for empathy: 

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
    dragging along never gaining never reaping never
    knowing and never understanding;

Walker strategically breaks her refrain of “for my people” four times. In the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas, “for my people” becomes “for my playmates,” “for the cramped bewildered years,” and “for the boys and girls.” These breaks force readers to slow down and attend closely to the poem for other shifts in language. 

The last deviation in the refrain comes in the poem’s denouement. After acknowledging (and so gathering the attention of) all her people, Walker replaces the refrain and relies on the repetition of a new phrase to ground a message of hope and desire:  

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a    
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
    rise and take control.

Walker constructs a tapestry from and for her people: “For My People” is an embrace of Blacks of the “gone years and the now years and the maybe years.” To guide readers out of the repetition of the downtrodden after her complex and sonically rich survey of her kin, Walker leans into uplift, evolution, and legacy. The sounds of Walker’s poem and of her people, as echoed by her own story, are those of hope crafted through community and resilience.