Joan Baez

Alice Walker , 2019

 
36 x 24 in

Joan remembers meeting author and activist Alice Walker on one of the many marches for peace and justice they’ve been on together.

“She was shy,” Joan recalls, “so I painted a sweet picture of her.”

Like Joan, Walker is a pacifist. And, like Joan, she has been arrested for her nonviolent beliefs. Protesting the Iraq war, she and fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams were arrested for crossing a police line outside the White House during an anti-war rally. She wrote about it in her essay “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.”

Best known for the novel “The Color Purple,” which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she has used her fame to further feminism and women’s rights as well as other social justice causes, once saying, “I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one we have dominant today.”

Her activism has roots in her undergraduate years. While a student at Spelman College in the 1960s, she met Martin Luther King Jr., took part in the March on Washington in 1963 and volunteered to register African American voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

On her website, she posted a quote that defines her world view and lifelong activism on behalf of the poor and oppressed. After returning from Gaza in 2008, she said: “We belong to the same world, the world where grief is not only acknowledged but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.”

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