Alice Walker - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969, who Walker described as "a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge." Walker and her husband divorced amicably in 1976.

Walker and her daughter became estranged. Rebecca felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter". She published a memoir entitled Black White and Jewish, expressing the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood. Rebecca recalls her teenage years when her mother would retreat to her far-off writing studio while “I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.” Since the birth of Rebecca’s son Tenzin, her mother has not spoken to her because she dared to “question her ideology.” Rebecca has learned that she was cut out of her mother’s will in favor of a distant cousin.

Alice Walker is the second cousin of comedian and musician Reggie Watts.

In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.

In 2011 shooting began on Beauty in Truth, a documentary film about Walker's life directed by Pratibha Parmar.