By Anthony Howard
Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center invited the community to join the celebration of the late Margaret Walker’s 109th birthday. The archive museum and Black Studies Institute founded in 1968, hosted a Jubilee picnic in the COFO Civil Rights Education Center on Thursday, July 11.
The picnic was named after the late author’s famous novel “Jubilee.” Director of the Margaret Walker Center, Robert Luckett, Ph.D., invited several community organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, MS Votes, and members of the West Jackson neighborhoods.
“Everything we do at the Margaret Walker Center is meant to engage the community,” he said. “We want to be engaged and make sure people know that the work we do is for them.”
Margaret Walker, born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915, lived in Jackson, Mississippi, for 49 years and worked as a professor for 30 years. The center she founded honors her academic, artistic, and activist legacy. Its mission is to preserve, interpret, and disseminate African American history and culture for a local and global community of students, scholars, and supporters.
MS Votes brought dozens of students from its inaugural Summer Youth Policy Institute to the celebration to learn about Alexander and COFO, and mingle with the JSU community. JSU alumnae and MS Votes advocacy and outreach coordinator, Maisie Brown saw the event as an amazing opportunity to expose the students to her alma mater.
“It was really important for us to come to this event because a lot of the students do not know who Margaret Walker is, some have never been on the campus of Jackson State,” Brown shared. “We thought it was a good idea to bring them to an event while the campus is lively so they can fellowship and get a feel for JSU.”
Brown said the students were excited about their visit and were very engaged and eager to learn more about Margaret Walker and the university’s historic legacy.
During her tenure as director of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, now the Margaret Walker Center, Walker organized several conferences that were the first of their kind.
Two of her most notable conferences were the 1971 National Evaluative Conference on Black Studies and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival in 1973.
After thirty years of teaching, Walker retired as professor emerita and donated her literary and administrative papers to the institute she founded. The Margaret Walker Center houses nearly 40 significant manuscript collections and an oral repository with nearly 1000 interviews.
