Paying Tribute to Trailblazers

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18th, 1931. Toni’s original name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford. She made the name change in college as she was finding people were having trouble pronouncing Chloe. The name Toni came from her confirmation name Anthony, after St. Anthony of Padua. She started using this as her first name when she was a student at Howard University in Washington. She received her Bachelor’s degree here in 1953 and went on to receive her Masters at Cornell University in 1955.

In her professional life she taught at Texas Southern University for two years before returning to Howard to teach. In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, and took his last name. They had two children together before they divorced in 1964. In 1965 Toni became the first female African American editor in Random House’s history. Random house is an American book publisher and the largest paperback publisher in the world. Five years later, Toni’s first book was published, The Bluest Eye tells the story of an African American girl in Lorain Ohio who wishes she better conformed to beauty standards of the time, feeling inferior due to her dark skin. The book includes controversial topics including racism, incest, and child molestation and there have been many attempts to ban the book from schools. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published, it contain themes of racism, sexuality, and gender roles. In a 1981 interview with Vogue magazine Toni shared, “I had written ‘Sula’ to talk about something I had known—about friendship in the fullest sense as it existed for certain Black women and other immigrant or pioneering types—women who, because of their race and sex, were dependent on each other sometimes literally for their very survival.” 1977 brought Song of Solomon, one of her most celebrated works and earned her the National Book Critics Circle Award. After Tar Baby in 1981 came one of Toni’s best-known novels, Beloved. This book is based on the true story of a formerly enslaved women in 1987 Ohio who is haunted by her past. The book is critically acclaimed and won Toni a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Beloved was adapted into a movie in 1998 and won multiple awards including NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture and Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Drama.  

While she continued to write books, Toni also taught. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University. Toni was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 before she retired from teaching in 2006. In 2010 Toni was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour, the highest French order of merit. Soon after, in 2012 she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

The documentary about her life and career, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am was released January 27th, 2019, just months before her death in August of the same year. She passed away in New York City at the age of 88. Toni Morrison is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. She wrote many books and essay collections throughout her years, tackling themes of the Black American Experience, systematic oppression, and loss of innocence. It is through her novels that her legacy lives on.