In the spring of 1976, a young Rudolph P. Byrd was a graduate student at Yale, his future as a highly respected literary expert at Emory University just a twinkle in his eye. But already he knew what he admired in an author — and she was sitting right there in front of him.

Visiting author Alice Walker was a few years away from publishing her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Color Purple," but her early writings captivated Byrd.

Hyosub Shin/AJC (ENLARGE)

Dr. Rudolph P. Bryd, professor at Emory's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, is a close friend of Walker and the man who made it all possible.

Johnny Crawford/AJC (ENLARGE)

This card from Langston Hughes is one of the many items Walker donated to Emory.

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He eagerly joined Walker and a small group of students for lunch at a nearby bistro after she spoke at a conference on African-American women writers.

"The fact that we were sitting together discussing her success and aspirations as a writer and my own aspirations to become a scholar and literary critic at Yale was proof we'd come some distance and the world had changed," Byrd, who is also African-American, recalled recently.

The friendship that began that day would be the catalyst for what some are calling a literary coup: Emory's acquisition late last year of Walker's extensive archive of personal papers.

"When I heard the news, I was green with envy," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and a friend of Byrd's. "I'm looking forward to him giving me a tour of the collection and watching him gloat over a glass of champagne."

Plenty of factors contributed to Walker's decision to house the papers at a school in her native Georgia, from the intangible to the political.

Walker was taken by the ambience of Emory's campus, and she shied away from a school in her adopted California because of policies that she said hurt minority enrollment. But Gates said an overriding factor was clear to him.

"Rudolph Byrd is one of the great scholars of Walker's work and African-American literature," he said. "There is absolutely no doubt that she made this decision because of her friendship and admiration for him."

In anticipation of Walker's Tuesday visit to Emory for a 6 p.m. reading at Glenn Memorial Auditorium, Byrd spoke to the AJC recently about his friendship with the author, the acquisition of her papers and its meaning to Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement.

Early connection

Rudolph Byrd was a junior at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., when he first read Alice Walker's work. She wrote about things familiar to him, both warmly and painfully.

A tale of a sharecropping family led by an abusive father rang true to Byrd, the grandson of sharecroppers. He shared it with the women in his family, and they recognized destructive patterns in the book and in their own experiences.

He said it made him realize history doesn't define the future.

"We can choose to be something else," Byrd said.

When Byrd met Walker at Yale, her speaking voice held him captive. He was struck by the enormous talent from such a "relatively small vessel."

"Even though she spoke with the authority of an adult, her voice had the qualities of a very young woman, sweet and endearing," Byrd remembered. "It was a lovely sound that I hope never leaves my head."

He left lunch that day, excited and full of hope, a feeling foreshadowing a professional relationship.

Meeting her made Byrd more interested in how he could interpret Walker's writing, which by its variety is considered of landmark significance in African-American and American literature.

"I knew her fiction would be important to me, to my research and teaching and my personal struggles against sexism, misogyny and patriarchy," Byrd said.

Years would pass before he'd see her again, but he was attuned to her work, particularly when she won the American Book Award and Pulitzer for "The Color Purple" in 1983.

The next year, not long after he wrote a less-than-glowing review of one of Walker's works, Byrd received a note from the author on purple stationary in a purple envelope: "I love and cherish the feeling of goodwill in your review of 'In Search of Our Mother's Garden.' "

When Byrd joined the faculty at Emory in 1991 as a professor of American Studies, they renewed their friendship in a meaningful way.

In 1996, he asked for and was granted Walker's permission to establish the Alice Walker Literary Society, a collaborative project between Spelman College and Emory, to promote broad scholarship on the the author's work.

Chartered the following year, the society set the course for near-constant contact with Walker and the acquisition of her papers.

Georgia connection

When Byrd learned Walker was looking for a place for her papers, he fired off an e-mail to Walker touting Emory: It had made a commitment to collect the work of African-American writers and it was important that any scholar engaged in research on her work should do so in her home state, where the setting would have an impact on how they treat her work. Walker hails from Eatonton, in Middle Georgia.

Walker had been in talks with the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley is within walking distance of Walker's home, but the absence of African-American students on campus left her uneasy.

The declining number of black students in California schools is tied to Proposition 209, a voter-approved initiative which no longer allows public institutions to consider race in admissions.

"At one point I offered to use half the amount they might have paid for my archive to fund scholarships for black students to attend the school," Walker wrote in an e-mail to the AJC. "The more I thought of this, though, the more I realized that the work of keeping black students out of higher education at UC Berkeley is something that has been deliberately done by the university and is therefore something for the university to address."

All for Emory

After visiting Emory — where she admired the "openness and awareness of its students" — she invited Byrd and Randall Burkett, Emory's curator of African American Collections, to California to see her papers.

"She had saved everything," Byrd said. "Some we could only glance at, some we could not read and could not touch because they were in a fireproof file cabinet and locked away."

When they returned to Emory, it was up to Byrd to keep the lines of communication open.

School officials, such as Provost Earl Lewis, would handle negotiations.

By fall, Walker decided. Her papers — all 122 boxes — would go to Emory.

Byrd saw himself only as part of a team that made the acquisition happen, but Walker said it "mattered very much" that he and Beverly Guy-Sheftall were involved.

Walker and Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College's director of the Women's Research and Resource Center, attended Spelman together more than 40 years ago.

"She is a wonderful friend, teacher, and human being who loves her students and Spelman College," Walker wrote in her e-mail. "Rudolph Byrd ... is a friend and someone I admire for his grace, intelligence, and all-around integrity."