What is the historical background of "Everyday Use"? Also, what similarities are there between Walker and her story?

In her short
story ","exposes the tensions between black urban life and black rural life, between
generations, and between black people who have had access to education and those who haven't.
She also considers how the black consciousness movement wasn't always about building a stronger
community; some, like Dee, may have used it to distinguish themselves from a past for which they
felt shame.

Dee wants to distance herself from her poor, rural roots and uses
her education and her awareness of Afrocentricity to cast herself as superior. Walker seems to
be exploring these unspoken divisions in the black community, which arose with black militancy
and the black consciousness movement in 1966. I use 1966 as a marker because this was the year
in which Stokely Carmichael took leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and coined the expression "Black Power." It is also the year in which the Black
Panthers first organized in Oakland, California. Around the same time, Ron (Maulana) Karenga
instituted Kwanzaa as a holiday in an effort to help black people feel more connected to their
African roots (it seemed irrelevant that Kwanzaa is a Swahili word, derived from Kenya, while
most black people from the Americas are of West and Central African descent) and to help them
develop shared community values based on the holiday's tenets. Kente cloth, derived from the
Akan and Ashanti people of Ghana, was also commonly worn at the time.

Undoubtedly, Walker was very aware of these socio-cultural currents and wanted to use
them to explore how the black consciousness movement was a positive thing but also something
that would force younger generations to question the social compromises their parents made to
survive in a white supremacist society. Walker, like Dee, came from rural Georgia. Unlike Dee,
Walker speaks positively of her parents, who were sharecroppers, and particularly of her mother,
who insisted that Walker would get an educationeven to the point of standing up to the
plantation owner who dared to say that Walker needn't bother with going to school.

Maintaining tradition was as key in Walker's family as in that of the Johnsons. In her
best-known essay, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," Walker writes about the great
care that her mother took in raising her own garden while living on a plantation. Walker
maintained this tradition when she settled in Northern California.