Election Section

Writer, activist, and Oakland resident Evelyn C. White settles into a comfortable leather chair at a Piedmont Avenue café and talks about her ten year project, researching and penning the biography of author Alice Walker (Alice Walker: A Life; W.W. Norton; September 2004; 496 pages; $29.95). 

“I arrived in San Francisco about the same time the movie The Color Purple was released by Warner Brothers. It was January 1986 and the protests against the film were just winding up,” she said. “The Hollywood chapter of the NAACP was critical of the portrayal of blacks in the film. Alice Walker was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and yet the movie version of her groundbreaking work was giving her the ‘biggest headache of her life.’” 

Despite the fact that Walker had requested that people of color work on the film, and even with the presence of many black actors (Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah), and even Quincy Jones’s musical accompaniment, the movie still met with opposition. 

“Blacks were protesting against a work of art by a woman who had grown up the daughter of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South, broken color lines, and marched for civil rights,” White said. “The first picket line Alice Walker ever crossed was the one for her movie. Sometimes you just can’t win.” 

Walker, a Berkeley resident, has gone on to write a number of critically acclaimed books, champion black women writers (most notably Zora Neale Hurston), and has become one of the world’s leading spokespersons against genital mutilation. White has also written several critically acclaimed books (Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships and The Black Woman’s Health Book) and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Women’s Studies Department at Mills College. 

Formerly a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, White attended journalism school at Columbia University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and taught expository writing at Harvard. She is a crusader for women’s rights, particularly as it relates to women of color.  

Brought up in a working class family in Gary, Indiana, White attended all black elementary schools and was involved with Upward Bound. 

“Every summer I was sent to college preparatory programs at places like Phillips Exeter, Yale and Purdue,” she said. “I chose to go to a Catholic high school because it was small, but the nuns tried to put me in the secretarial track. I had to take typing and I became very fast at it. It’s because of the racism of the nuns that I developed a skill that I’ve been able to put to good use ever since.” 

White graduated with honors and in 1972 she entered Wellesley College with the goal of becoming a prison warden. 

“All the groovy people were going to prison: Martin Luther King, Angela Davis. I thought that’s where I should be too,” she said. “But by the time I took child psychology my sophomore year I knew I didn’t want to be a warden.” 

What did she want to major in? “Theater,” she said.  

After graduating from Wellesley in 1976, she headed to Denmark where she worked for a theatrical company. When she returned to the United States she enrolled in the Theater Studies Department at the University of Washington. But while in Seattle she began freelancing as a writer.  

“When I realized someone was going to pay me to write, I applied to Columbia’s School of Journalism, and after a stint with the Wall Street Journal, I took a reporting job with the San Francisco Chronicle,” she said. “I fell in love with the Bay Area, the weather, the diversity, the vibrations in the Castro, and with the lemon, orange and avocado trees. I’ve been here ever since.” 

In a writing career that has spanned over twenty years, what is she most proud of besides the Walker biography? 

“It’s a series of articles I did for the Chronicle: homophobia in the black church, teen pregnancy, and an investigative piece on black farmers in the Central Valley,” White said. “I’m very concerned about environmental issues pertaining to black people and the land. It’s painful for me to go to the Oakland Farmers’ Market and not see one black farmer. African Americans are descendants of an agricultural society dating back to the plains and valleys of Africa. We’ve lost that heritage and we need to reclaim it.” 

What’s next for White in terms of writing? “I’m going to open myself to the cosmic forces,” she says. “I’m inclined to sit on chairs just like this for awhile and rest. And then I’m going to take piano lessons.” 

Sponsored by the Berkeley Arts Festival and the Friends of the Library, Evelyn White will read from Alice Walker: A Life, and will be interviewed by KPFA’s Andrea Lewis, at the Berkeley Public Library (2090 Kittredge Street) on Friday, October 1 at 8 p.m. For more information call 510-981-6100 or connect to www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.a