Walter Everette Hawkins
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Walter Everette Hawkins | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 17 November 1883 |
| Died | Unknown |
| Alma mater | Kittrell College |
| Occupations | Poet, mail clerk |
Walter Everette Hawkins (17 November 1883 – unknown)[1] was a poet,[2] mail clerk,[3] and freethinker,[4] described as being 'an important figure in the transition of black literature from the genteel modes of the nineteenth century to the flowering of black militancy often identified with the Harlem Renaissance'.[1]
Hawkins was born on 17 November 1883[1] in North Carolina, the thirteenth child of formerly enslaved parents.[4][1] One of Hawkins' older brothers, John R. Hawkins — though a railway mail service worker when Walter was born — went on to become a teacher and the president of Kittrell College.[1] Walter Everette Hawkins received some schooling in Warrenton, graduated from Kittrell College in 1901, and later left North Carolina for Washington.[4][1] There, he worked as a mail clerk for the post office, and wrote poetry.[1][2] 'My only recreation,' he wrote, was 'in stealing away to be with the masters, the intellectual dynamos, of the world, who converse with me without wincing and deliver me the key to life's riddle.'[4]
Hawkins' first published collection was Chords and Discords (originally published in 1909, and again, revised, in 1920).[1] He wrote in his preface to Chords and Discords:
My greatest reward lies in the hope that some Chords herein struck may be the inspiration of some into whose hands they may come, and set into motion a stream of fellow-feeling, of friendship and love flowing from them to me and from me to them, thence to all the hearts that throb and thrill with the joy that makes kings and queens of this our common clay.[5]
In 1936, now living in Brooklyn, New York, Hawkins published Petals from the Poppies.[1]
