Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement Author(s): Roberta M. Hendrickson Source:MELUS,Vol. 24, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism (Autumn, 1999), pp. 111-128 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: Accessed: 17-04-2018 13:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at Oxford University Press, Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MELUS This content downloaded from 137.158.146.106 on Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:47:31 UTC All use subject to
Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement Roberta M. Hendrickson University of Wyoming "If the Civil Rights Movement is 'dead,'1 and if it gave us noth else, it gave us each other forever," wrote Alice Walker in her f published essay, in 1967 (Gardens 128). Her statement is true Walker as an African American woman and as a writer. The Move- ment reaffirmed African Americans' connection to each other as a people and to their history of struggle against oppression. The Move- ment also allowed Walker to claim her self-she has described herself as "called to life" by the Movement-and to claim the lives of African American women of the rural South as the subject of her fiction (Gar- dens 122). Walker grew up in rural Georgia, and, as a student at Spel- man College from 1961 to 1963, she became involved in the Atlanta Movement, working at voter registration and participating in march- es and demonstrations (J. Harris 33). Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged civil rights workers to "'Go back to Mississippi...go back to Georgia,"' in his speech during the March on Washington in 1963, she returned to the South for two summers and went to live in Mississippi during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working at voter registration, teaching Headstart teachers and writing stories about rural southern black women. (Gardens 163, 27). Participation in the Civil Rights Movement was central to Walker's life not only as a young woman but also as a young writer. She has written about the Movement in some of her early poems, in short sto- ries, in essays, and briefly in her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), but Meridian (1976) is her novel of the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian is more than a novel about the Civil Rights Movement, and critics have focused on many aspects of this complex work.2 But I would like to focus on Meridian as a novel of the Civil
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