As the schools in Eatonton were segregated, Walker attended the only high school available to blacks: Butler Baker High School. She went there to become valedictorian and enrolled in Spelman College in 1961 after being granted a full scholarship by the state of Georgia for having the highest academic achievements of her class. She found two of her professors, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, to be great mentors during her time at Spelman, but both were transferred two years later. Walker was offered another scholarship, this time from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and after the firing of her Spelman professor, Howard Zinn, Walker accepted the offer. Walker became pregnant at the start of her senior year and had an abortion; this experience, as well as the bout of suicidal thoughts that followed, inspired much of the poetry found in Once, Walker’s first collection of poetry. Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965.

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

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 interracial couple in Mississippi. They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. Walker and her husband divorced in 1976.

Following graduation, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, before returning to South. She took a job working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi. Walker also worked as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program. She later returned to writing as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1968–69) and Tougaloo College (1970–71). In addition to her work at Tougaloo College, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970. The novel explores the life of Grange Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband and father.

In 1973, before becoming editor of Ms. Magazine, Walker and literary scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered an unmarked grave they believed to be that of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. The line “a genius of the south” is from Jean Toomer’s poem Georgia Dusk, which appears in his book Cane. Hurston was actually born in 1891, not 1901.

Walker’s 1975 article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. Magazine, helped revive interest in the work of this African-American writer and anthropologist.

In 1976, Walker’s second novel, Meridian, was published. Meridian is a novel about activist workers in the South, during the civil rights movement, with events that closely parallel some of Walker’s own experiences. In 1982, she published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple. The novel follows a young, troubled black woman fighting her way through not just racist white culture but patriarchal black culture as well. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totaling 910 performances.

Walker’s specific brand of feminism included advocacy of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term womanist in her collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, to mean “a black feminist or feminist of color.” The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at “the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression.” Walker states that, “‘Womanism’ gives us a word of our own.” because it is a discourse of Black women and the issues they confront in society. Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women’s concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives.”

In the late 1970s, Walker moved to northern California. Walker is the co-founder of Wild Tree Press, a feminist publishing company in Anderson Valley, California. She and fellow writer Robert L. Allen founded it in 1984.

In honor of her mother, Minnie Tallulah Grant, and paternal grandmother, Walker legally added “Tallulah Kate” to her name in 1994. Minnie Tallulah Grant’s grandmother, Tallulah, was Cherokee. Walker is a cousin of musician Reggie Watts.

In 2000, Walker released a collection of short fiction, based on her own life, called The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, exploring love and race relations. In this book, Walker details her interracial relationship with Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney who was also working in Mississippi. The couple married on March 17, 1967, in New York City, since interracial marriage was then illegal in the South, and divorced in 1976. They had a daughter, Rebecca, together in 1969. Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s only child, is an American novelist, editor, artist, and activist. The Third Wave Foundation, an activist fund, was co-founded by Rebecca and Shannon Liss-Riordan. Her godmother is Alice Walker’s mentor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem.

On March 8, 2003, International Women’s Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.”

In 2007, Walker donated her papers, consisting of 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled “Poems of a Childhood Poetess.”

In January 2009, she was one of over 50 signatories of a letter protesting against the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to City” spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, and condemning Israel as an “apartheid regime.”

Two months later, Walker and 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink traveled to Gaza in response to the Gaza War. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders with Gaza. She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom March.

On June 23, 2011, she announced plans to participate in an aid flotilla to Gaza that attempted to break Israel’s naval blockade. Her participation in the 2011 Gaza flotilla prompted an op-ed, headlined “Alice Walker’s bigotry,” written by American law professor Alan Dershowitz in The Jerusalem Post. Dershowitz said, by participating in the flotilla to evade the blockade, she was “provid[ing] material support for terrorism.”

In her 2011 book The Chicken Chronicles, Walker describes her diet as mostly vegetarian, with a previous 5-month attempt at eating vegan. Several of her meditative chapters in the book describe her giving thanks thoughtfully and seriously for the life of the animal whenever she eats meat. Walker also carefully delineates several of these meat-eating instances in one chapter, describing the animal, the meal’s location and social situation, and her thoughts on eating meat at the time. These chapters are told within the framework of a letter addressed to her pet chickens. Walker draws many parallels between the vegetables and grains both she and her chickens enjoy eating.

Walker is a judge member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. She supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. In 2012, Walker refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of her book The Color Purple, criticizing what she called Israel’s “apartheid state.”

In 2013, Alice Walker published two new books, one of them entitled The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way. The other was a book of poems entitled The World Will Follow Joy Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems).

In May 2013, Walker posted an open letter to singer Alicia Keys, asking her to cancel a planned concert in Tel Aviv. “I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work,” Walker wrote. “It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists.” Keys rejected the plea.

In May 2013, Walker expressed appreciation for the works of the British conspiracy theorist David Icke. On BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she said that Icke’s book Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More would be her choice if she could have only one book. The book promotes the theory that the Earth is ruled by shapeshifting reptilian humanoids and “Rothschild Zionists”. Jonathan Kay of the National Post described this book (and Icke’s other books) as “hateful, hallucinogenic nonsense.” Kay wrote that Walker’s public praise for Icke’s book was “stunningly offensive” and that by taking it seriously, she was disqualifying herself “from the mainstream marketplace of ideas.”

In June 2013, Walker and others appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning, an American soldier imprisoned for releasing classified information.

Walker has been a longtime sponsor of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In early 2015, she wrote: “So 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.”

In 2017, Walker published what Tablet magazine described as “an explicitly anti-Semitic poem” on her blog entitled “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud”, recommending that the reader should start with YouTube to learn about the shocking aspects of the Talmud. The poem includes the lines: “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews?” and “Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse? Are young boys fair game for rape?”

In 2018, Walker was asked by an interviewer from The New York Times Book Review “What books are on your nightstand?” She listed Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, a book promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory which draws on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and queries the Holocaust. Walker said: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” Walker defended her admiration for Icke and his book, saying, “I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.” According to multiple sources, Walker will not allow The Color Purple to be published in Hebrew.