Early Life
Walker was born Rebecca Leventhal in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Alice Walker, the African-American author of The Color Purple, and Mel Leventhal, a Jewish American lawyer. After her parents divorced, she spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father's home in the largely Jewish Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City and her mother's largely African-American environment in San Francisco, where she attended The Urban School of San Francisco. When she was 18, she decided to change her surname from Leventhal to Walker, her mother's maiden name.
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