Toni Morrison (1931-2019) edited and published the first edition of Angela Davis’s Autobiography in 1974. She released her novel ‘Beloved’ in 1987. Based on the true story of a Black enslaved woman, the book was a Bestseller for 25 weeks and won countless awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Dr. Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The author of 11 novels, 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren’s books, an opera, and critical essays, Dr. Morrison’s haunting, incisive book, Beloved, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Her prose powerfully invoked both the awesome beauty and historical torment of Black womanhood in America.
Professor Morrison’s work bravely examined enslavement and its afterlives. Through The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, she plunged readers headlong into a world where racism and poverty gestated addiction, 𝓈ℯ𝓍ual abuse, and murder. Yet these works also evidenced the richness, splendor, and resilience of Black women.
We revere Professor Morrison because she never shied away from condemning white supremacy. Her vital words during her interview with Charlie Rose in 1998, remain as relevant now as when she first declared them: “Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste, and it’s a corruption, and a distortion….What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Still smart? You still like yourself?….If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is, white people have a very, very serious problem. And they should start thinking about what they can do about it.”
Essays such as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and her more recent, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, and The Origin of Others, remain instructive and liberatory.
