Chloe Anthony Wofford, better known as Toni Morrison, was born February 18th in Lorain Ohio in 1931. Her parents relocated to Ohio hoping to escape racism of the South in order to better provide for their children. She was the second of four children in a working-class family, and when she started school she was the only black girl in the class room, and also the only child who knew how to read. Lorain was an interesting town for its time, Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics would all live in the same neighborhoods, in fact Chloe didn't run into any racism until she entered high school and started dating. She graduated from Lorain High School in 1949 and continued her education at Howard University where she received her bachelor’s degree in English and Classics in 1953. She later received her master’s degree from Cornell University in 1955. She then started her career as a teacher in 1955 at Texas Southern University and later leaves to go teach at Howard. Soon, she marries Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, and they later have two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. In 1963 Toni becomes the senior editor at Random House’s New York City. In 1970 her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published and it was then that she started to receive critical acclaim and the reputation as being a powerful and poetic writer of Black America. She went on to publish more than 15 novels, including Beloved and A Mercy. She wrote the lyrics to numerous songs and a play that was never published. Toni has received over 30 awards and nominations in the United States alone, and many overseas the most notable of these awards are the Pullitzer Prize (1988) and The Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).
You mentioned above that Morrison was not a victim of social and racial injustice until high school. Where do you think her passion for slavery, that is portrayed in her various novels, originates if not from her own life?
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that maybe her passion for slavery is rooted in her parents' past. Do any of your sources explain the senarios of racism that her parents were trying to escape from? Did this affect Morrison psychologically?
ReplyDeleteHer father, George Wofford, was born in the South, where he faced racial prejudice and oppression. Because of his treatment at the hands of whites, he nurtured a hatred for them his entire life. Her mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, held a completely different view of whites. She was also from the South but spoke of happy memories in the South. However, her father did return to visit family in the South while her mother never did.
ReplyDeleteShe was raised in a town that was too small to have racially segregated schools. Toni says that she did not experience discrimination until reaching her dating years, where race did play a large role. An instance that also may have affected her involved her landlord (it doesn't say his race) trying to burn down the house with her entire family inside because they couldn't afford to pay the rent one month.
I think her biographical information is very interesting and the fact the she didn't experience any "major" racism in her life is unique too. Therefore, do you think that her writing was fueled from stories that her father or family told her about in their past? Or from a different source like just the historical culture of her race?
ReplyDelete