Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement

As a black woman who grew up in the South and came of age in the 1960s in the Civil Rights Movement and was influenced by the Women's Movement that grew out of it, Alice Walker was uniquely placed to interpret the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath in fiction. Because she writes from the perspective of the 1970s, when the Movement had long since been declared dead, she makes it possible for her readers to understand what was lost when the Civil Rights Movement ended: in remembering the dream, she reaffirms the Movement's vision of freedom, equality and nonviolence and its commitment to the black and poor and compels us to think about these issues once again. In Meridian Walker uses her experience in the Movement and the experience of others, especially black women, to explore issues of gender as well as race: she explores the effects of the burden of history, of growing up in a racist society, on relationships between black women and men, black men and white women, and black women and white women in the Civil Rights Movement. Writing Meridian also allowed Walker to accept her role as an artist and not a revolutionary, but a black revolutionary artist, one who passes on the story of the Civil Rights Movement to future generations, teaching them their history, inspiring them to continue the struggle.

Notes

(1.) Historians date the Civil Rights Movement from the 1954 Supreme Court Brown decision or from the Montgomery bus boycott, which began late the following year, to 1965, the year of the march from Selma to Montgomery and of the Voting Rights Act, or to 1968, the year of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

(2.) A few of the most interesting approaches are Barbara Christian's chapter on Meridian in Black Women Novelists, aptly described by Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work as "an incredibly rich and full interpretation of Meridian," one which includes a discussion of the Civil Rights Movement; Christian's essay focusing on motherhood in Meridian, "An Angle of Seeing.... "in Black Feminist Criticism; Deborah E. McDowell's essay "The Self in Bloom," which focuses on Meridian as a bildungsroman; and Anne M. Downey's essay `A Broken and Bloody Hoop': The Intertextuality of Black Elk Speaks and Alice Walker's Meridian".

(3.) They include Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists, Melissa Walker in Down from the Mountaintop, Madhu Dubey in Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, Susan Danielson in "Alice Walker's Meridian, Feminism, and the `Movement'" and Norman Harris in Connecting Times: The Sixties in AfroAmerican Fiction. Danielson's and Harris's approaches are most like my own. They provide historical background about SNCC (Harris provides background about black nationalist groups as well), but they do not consider Walker's essays about her experience in the Civil Rights Movement (though Danielson mentions them in her notes).

(4.) Other well known African American women novelists have written about but do not focus on the Movement in their novels. Ntozake Shange writes about her childhood in St. Louis during the school desegregation struggle in Betsey Brown, and in The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara's protagonist, a nationalist and activist, remembers the brutal beating of another character and a grueling march during the Civil Rights Movement. In Down from the Mountaintop Melissa Walker writes about Shange's and Bambara's novels, about Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, novels that are set, in part, during the years of the Civil Rights Movement or its aftermath, though the characters are not involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and about novels by less well known writers like Rosa Guy, whose novel A Measure of Time deals briefly, at the end, with the Montgomery bus boycott, and Kristin Hunter, whose novel The Lakestown Rebellion is set in the North during the Movement. Melissa Walker has pointed out the similarities of time and place in Meridian and The Salt Eaters and the [act that "each novel has a female protagonist suffering from debilitating illness that is at least in part caused by stress in the civil rights movement." (180). But Toni Cade Bambara was born in the North a decade before Alice Walker and did not participate in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. She was an activist in African American communities for much of her adult life, and that is the experience she drew upon in writing The Salt Eaters. (See Tate, 12-38).