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Celebrating the life and legacy of Toni Morrison and her magnificent contributions to American literature and culture.
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WHEREAS, Chloe Anthony Wofford "Toni" Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019, marking the end of an unprecedented creative force in American life; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Morrison ushered in an era of breakthrough black writing to mainstream media, creating a space for writers of color in the publishing world; and
WHEREAS, As the Nobel Foundation explains, "Ms. Morrison's works revolve around African-Americans - both their history and their situation in our own time. Her works often depict difficult circumstances and the dark side of humanity, but still convey integrity and redemption;" and
WHEREAS, As a writer who was both a critical and commercial success, Ms. Morrison was an exceptionally rare talent whose life journey forged new paths in both academic, literary, and artistic circles; and
WHEREAS, As historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes, "For nearly half a century, we have been looking to Toni Morrison for guidance - to help us think, through literature, as we find our way through the world. With grace and wisdom, she respected, represented and rendered the beauty and complexity of the black experience"; and
WHEREAS, Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflected that Ms. Morrison "was Black and she didn't apologize for her Blackness, and she didn't pander and she didn't temper the painful reality of Black American history, in a country that often seemed keen to minimize it. She stared pain in the face, unblinking. She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief"; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, to a working-class, African American family. From a young age, Ms. Morrison was a fervent reader and storyteller, counting Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy among her favorite authors and participating in the drama c...
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