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Mr. Anderson

Walker, Margaret

by Mr. Anderson - Saturday, November 20, 2010, 7:52 PM
 
Born in Birmingham, Alabama. in 1915, Margaret Walker was the daughter of a Methodist minister and a music teacher, She was encouraged to read poetry and philosophy at an early age. Walker attended New Orleans University for two years until Langston Hughes recognized her talent as a poet and urged her to seek training in the North, She transferred to Northwestern University and received her BA in English at nineteen. In 1937 her poem For My People was published in Poetry magazine, while she worked with the Federal Writers Project under President Roosevelt’s WPA. There she met and befriended the author Richard Wright, often helping him revise and edit texts. Walker’s involvement with the WPA gave her a firsthand glimpse of the struggles of inner-city blacks in Chicago. She returned to school in 1939, participating in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she earned her Masters degree in 1940 and her PhD in 1941. Walker was a professor at Jackson State College for 30 years. During that time, she published her first volume of poems, For My People. In 1966 Walker published Jubilee, a neoslave narrative based on the memories of her maternal grandmother.



Mr. Anderson

Wallace, George C.

by Mr. Anderson - Saturday, November 20, 2010, 7:52 PM
 
As a four-time governor of Alabama, Wallace has become known as the embodiment of resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Wallace worked his way through the University of Alabama Law School by boxing professionally, waiting tables, and driving a taxi. Wallace opposed advancement rights for blacks as well as increased power for the national government. In 1963 Wallace gained national prominence when he kept his campaign pledge to stand “in the schoolhouse door’ to block the integration of Alabama’s schools. He personally blocked the path of two black students attempting to register at the University of Alabama. During all his years in office, Alabama ranked near the bottom of the states in per capital income, education spending, and welfare. In 1972 wallace was hit by the bullet of a would-be assassin, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1998.


Mr. Anderson

Warren, Earl

by Mr. Anderson - Saturday, November 20, 2010, 7:52 PM
 
Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court during one of the most turbulent eras in history, Earl Warren tried controversial cases that went to the heart of civil liberties and the nature of our political system. Born in California, the son of a railroad repairman, warren spent summers working on the rail system, developing insights into the anti-Asian racism then rampant on the west coast. After attending law school at the University of Berkeley, warren served briefly in wwl then worked for the Alameda County District Attorney for eighteen years. Though known as a tough prosecutor, warren was also sensitive to the rights of the accused and personally fought to secure public defense for those who couldn’t afford it. Between 1938 and 1942, Warren served as the attorney general of California, and was then elected governor of that state. As governor, warren was best-known for evacuating Japanese immigrants from the West Coast. President Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice in 1953, taking over a court deeply divided between those advocating a more active role and those interested in morejudicial restraint, warren secured consensus on Brown v. Board of Education in one of his first cases. The Brown case was just the first in a long string of judgments creating a more active role for the Supreme Court.


Mr. Anderson

Wilbur, Richard

by Mr. Anderson - Thursday, February 21, 2013, 1:05 PM
 

Born in 1921 in New York City, Richard Wilbur won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for Things of This World: Poems and his second in 1989 for New and Collected Poems. He is known primarily as a writer of poetry; he has also written a number of critical essays, translations of French poetry and his critiques of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1987, Wilbur became the second poet laureate of the United States. 


Mr. Anderson

Wright, Richard

by Mr. Anderson - Saturday, November 20, 2010, 7:52 PM
 
Born in Mississippi in 1908, Richard Wright was the son of an illiterate sharecropper father and a schoolteacher mother. when wright was five years old, his father left the family and his mother was forced to take domestic jobs away from home, wright’s first published story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," appeared in three parts in the Southern Register in 1924. He moved to Memphis at age seventeen, borrowing the library card of an Irish coworker in order to satisfy his voracious literary appetite. Wright moved to Chicago in 1927 and joined the Communist Party. He worked with the Federal Negro Theater in Chicago under the Federal Writers Project. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City and helped start New Challenge magazine. During this time his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, won first prize in a Story magazine contest. wright’s novel Native Son was published in 1940, becoming the first best-selling novel by an African American writer Black Boy, wright’s personal and emotional account of his childhood and adolescence in the Jim Crow South, was published in 1945 and also became a best-seller In 1947 wright moved permanently to France, settling in Paris, though he traveled extensively. This international outlook broadened the scope of his writing until his death in 1960 of a heart attack.