As Director of the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience at Jackson State University, Dr. Luckett has become a leading scholar on the great writer, scholar and teacher, Margaret Walker. Best known as the author of For My People (1942) and the neo-slave narrative Jubilee (1966), Walker in fact wrote nine books. More importantly, as a professor of English at JSU, she made a less well-known but indelible contribution when she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People (now named in her honor) in 1968. At the forefront of a nascent Black Studies movement, Walker considered W.E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes to be her mentors; she in turn became a mentor for hundreds of students and many writers, actors and scholars like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and so many others. From 1915 until her death in 1998, Margaret Walker stood at the center of a vibrant community of black artists, activists and intellectuals in the United States and abroad. Among our earliest public intellectuals, Walker frequently turned to a range of disciplines in seeking explanations and analyses. Her optimism derived from what she believed to be the human capacity to create and produce written, artistic and other forms of expressive culture as a record of lived experience.
