In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

In this essay—written, as she details in a short preface, when she was 23 years old—Walker defends the Civil Rights Movement against disaffected white liberals, who believe that it has accomplished nothing. The central point of her essay is that the gains of the Movement are as much spiritual as they are material; that is, the Movement taught many black people to conceive of themselves, for the first time, as human and deserving. Walker also makes the point that black people, unlike white people, do not have the luxury of giving up on the struggle for racial equality: “If the Civil Rights Movement is dead, and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever […] Because we live, it can never die” (128-29).

Walker recalls her own first encounter with the Movement, which came from seeing Martin Luther King on television, while still living at home with her parents. Her own mother had been addicted to soap operas featuring wealthy white characters, and Walker contrasts her own moment of illumination, seeing King, with her mother’s bewildered restlessness and sense of inferiority:

She placed herself in every scene she saw, with her braided hair turned blond, her two hundred pounds compressed into a size-seven dress, her rough dark skin smooth and white […] And when she turned to look at my father sitting near her in his sweat shirt […] there was always a tragic look of surprise on her face (123).