I had a preliminary conversation with Robert Luckett, Director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, en route to a booksigning, while preparing this piece. It was not lost on me that photographs comprising the backdrop to the event were primarily those of white authors: prominently Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and, largest of all, Ernest Hemingway, an author from elsewhere.
The omission of African American authors — Mississippians Margaret Walker, Jesmyn Ward, and Natasha Trethewey among them — is a sin of unintentional omission rather than racism.
The Margaret Walker Center deserves no less attention than the Eudora Welty House and Foundation. It is for us the living to eliminate ongoing prejudice.
How many people are aware that a recently premiered operatic adaptation of Margaret Walker’s acclaimed 1966 novel “Jubilee” will be staged at Jackson State University at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon June 14, 2026?
The novel is a fictionalized account of family stories that Margaret Walker heard from her maternal grandmother Elvira Ware Dozier; who lived with Walker, her parents, and siblings.
Margaret Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham. Both parents were educators. They secured professorships at what is today Dillard University — the mother in the music department, and the father in the religion department. Margaret Walker was raised in New Orleans.
Elvira Ware Dozier recounted indignities African Americans endured as Reconstruction was undermined by Redemption, in pursuit of Jim Crow segregation, a variation on a theme of enslavement.
Margaret Walker’s parents were displeased that her maternal grandmother revealed the painful past. The Walkers never envisioned that family stories would empower their daughter to become an acclaimed author, sharing stories in print.
The maternal grandmother in “Jubilee” is Minna. Minna’s mother is Vyry, diminutive of Elvira Ware Dozier’s given name.
Elvira Ware Dozier’s mother was Margaret Duggans Ware Brown. Margaret Walker was named for Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who died in 1915, Margaret Walker’s birth year.
The generation of Margaret Duggans Ware Brown and her first husband, blacksmith Randall Ware, in Georgia, is the life force of the novel:
Reconstruction opened possibilities for African Americans — affluence and education — threatening complacent peckerwoods incapable of competing, some of whom became nightriders.
Margaret Walker’s family succeeded admirably given freedom and opportunity after emancipation. They moved several times, cheated out of land by unscrupulous landlords under whom the family sharecropped.
The family repeatedly overcame odds against them, ultimately acquiring land and a home of their own. Ku Klux Klansmen seeking to intimidate formerly enslaved people and foreclose possible successes burned the Wares’ home. All of this occurred during the decades following the Civil War.
Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, Vyry in the novel, was biracial in both instances — with a black mother and a white father. Her appearance tended towards her white ancestry. She could have passed as white.
Margaret Duggans Ware Brown became a midwife. Her patients thought that she was white. She decided that it would be prudent to tell the truth and became a respected community member.
“Jubilee” premiered on Thursday May 28, 2026, at the Schwarzman Center at Yale University, which created the ASCEND program to partner with historically black colleges and universities. The premiere concluded the Yale Innovation Summit.
Randy Klein is the composer. Joan Ross Sorkin is the librettist. Klein composed a song cycle of Margaret Walker’s poems, celebrating the centennial of Walker’s birth.
The Mississippi opera premiere is open to the public, free of charge, at the F.D. Hall Music Center at Jackson State University — which name used as a search term for driving directions will take one there.
The event will be a concert performance, utilizing 34 singers, 11 roles and a chorus of 23, and a single piano.
Opera South previously performed an opera based on “Jubilee” — composed by Ulysses Kay for the 1976 bicentennial — at Jackson State University. Margaret Walker’s cultural contributions deserve abundant appreciation.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
