“Silver writes” is a distortion of the term Civil Rights: a term that Walker feels is too dry and bureaucratic to encompass black liberation. It is also the title of her poem that appears at the beginning of this short essay. The essay then explains why the poem is her favorite poem, of all of the poems that she wrote during the Civil Rights movement. She writes that it is important to her because “it […] reveals why the term ‘Civil Rights’ could never adequately express black people’s revolutionary goals, because it could never adequately describe our longings and our dreams, or those of the non-black people who stood among us” (336).

Walker details in a footnote to the essay that “silver writes” was how older rural African-Americans tended to pronounce “civil rights” and how they “did their best to instill what accurate poetry they could into this essentially white civil servants’ term” (336). 

This short essay concerns the anti-nuclear war movement and is ultimately an exhortation to people of color to join the movement, rather than to give in to feelings of anger and helplessness about a disaster that they had no part in creating. Walker opens the essay with a lengthy and elaborate curse that she clarifies was collected by