[1] Walter Everette Hawkins received some schooling in Warrenton, graduated from Kittrell College in 1901, and later left North Carolina for Washington.

[1][2] 'My only recreation,' he wrote, was 'in stealing away to be with the masters, the intellectual dynamos, of the world, who converse with me without wincing and deliver me the key to life's riddle.

/ To accept without a reason / Is to debase one’s humanity / And destroy the fundamental process / In the ascertainment of Truth.In Negro Poets and their Poems, Robert Thomas Kerlin described this as 'a faithful self-characterization—such a man in reality is Walter Everette Hawkins.

[1] He was a member of the Negro Society for Historical Research, and published poems in the African Times and Orient Review, and in The Crisis.

[1] In the preface to Petals from the Poppies (1936), he expressed his belief that 'since all Art is to a large extent propaganda', poetry should 'ally itself with the forces contending mightily for universal justice, freedom and peace; and against all those influence and institutions of evil, oppression and cruelty'.