• THE 1930s AND 1940s
• THE 1950s AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY
• THE 1960s
• THE 1970s
• THE 1980s AND 1990s
• NOTES

THE 1930s AND 1940s

Toni Morrison was born in 1931, less than two years after the stock market crashed and the United States fell into a general economic depression that continued until World War I. The decade of the 1930s was one of economic hardships for most poor and working-class people. For African Americans, especially the three-quarters of that population that lived in the South, it was dire. Those who migrated to northern urban areas from the rural South in search of better living conditions and employment opportunities quickly learned that whites would not hire them because they were African Americans. Even skilled laborers found it difficult, if not impossible, to be hired on a work crew. A lucky few, such as Morrison’s father, regularly were hired at a lower wage than the white workers and were assigned to do the most dangerous jobs. Many other African Americans lost their jobs to less skilled white workers when employers, out of economic necessity, had to cut their workforces. By 1933, more than twelve million Americans were unemployed. Because of racist practices in most industries and professions, for many years African Americans were the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Even in economically stable times prior to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, African Americans had no legal protections against unfair and discriminatory practices in labor, education, and housing.

The MacTeer family’s living conditions described in The Bluest Eye were typical for most African American families during the 1930s and 1940s. Most working-class families during that period, both African American and white, had at least one roomer. In The Bluest Eye, that roomer is Mr. Henry. For the young narrator, Claudia, the idea of a roomer is exotic: “Our roomer. Our roomer. The words ballooned from the lips and hovered about our heads—silent, separate, and pleasantly mysterious. My mother was all ease and satisfaction in discussing his coming.”¹ Claudia’s mother is “all ease and satisfaction” because Mr. Henry’s

choice of her house over the others available to him means extra income for the household. His stay there also raises her esteem in the eyes of her gossipy neighbors. Mrs. MacTeer had beat out the competition.

During the Depression even the best and most frugal homemakers found it difficult to stretch their already limited budgets. According to the historian Lois Rita Helmbold, “About half of urban northern Black families received relief in the mid 1930s, three or four times the rate of white families in the same areas.”² Morrison’s family was no exception. Despite her father’s best efforts, they on occasion had to accept welfare relief.³ In a 1994 interview for The New York Times Magazine Morrison told Claudia Dreifus that she knew her family was very poor, “But that was never degrading.” Morrison remembers that despite their impoverishment, her parents made their children “feel as though there were these rather extraordi-nary deserving people within us.”⁴ The children were taught not to gauge their worthiness in economic terms.

The economic circumstances of Morrison’s family and of millions of other American families improved after the United States entered World War II on 8 December 1941, the day after Japan attacked the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The demand for labor as a result of the war opened up employment opportunities for both women and men in manufacturing and industry. The first few years of the war effort resulted in significant demographic shifts, with more than 470,000 African Americans leaving the rural South for the North, where they hoped to find employment in the national defense industry. The industry also briefly brought economic independence to black women. The proportion of black women working in industry rose from 6.8 percent in 1940 to 18 percent in 1944. For the first time in the his-tory of the United States, more African American women were working in industry than in domestic service. Similar to African American men, however, the women were limited by racism. The best jobs went to white women. African American women worked at hard, often hazardous jobs for low wages in deplorably dirty working environments. When the war ended and women were urged to return to their traditional roles as keepers of the hearth, African American women were among the first to be let go. Many of them did not return home, though. Those who came north generally stayed in the cities and tried to find work in the domestic and service sectors of the labor market.

Morrison grew up in a time when educational and career expectations for African American women were not high. Like most women in this country, African American women were expected to get married and raise a family after graduating from high school. College-bound women, and particularly African American women, were steered to colleges with strong programs in home economics. Since only 4 percent of all African American families in 1949—the year Morrison left Lorain, Ohio, for college—had a total annual household income of $5,000 or more (as compared to 21 percent of all white families), and the median annual black family’s income was $1,650 (as compared with $3,232 for white families),⁵ African American women took it for granted that they would work outside the home to help support their families.⁶ Employment opportunities for African Americans in general were limited, the result of de facto and de jure racial segregation. African American men worked as laborers, while African American women worked as domestics or in other service fields. African American women with college degrees could expect to teach in segregated schools and colleges, to go into social work, or to go into nursing.

Morrison recalled in her interview with Dreifus that she was around thirteen years old when she first went to work for a white family. That experience provided her with a framework for Pauline Breed-love in The Bluest Eye:

That was the kind of work that was available: to go to a woman’s house after school and clean for three or four hours. The normal teen-age jobs were not available. Housework always was. It wasn’t uninteresting. You got to work these gadgets that I never had at home: vacuum cleaners. Some of the people were nice. Some were terrible. Years later, I used some of what 1 observed in my fiction. In The Bluest Eye, Pauline lived in this dump and hated everything in it. And then she worked for the Fishers, who had this beautiful house, and she loved it. She got a lot of respect as their maid that she didn’t get anywhere else. If she went to the grocery store as a black woman from that little house and said, “I don’t want this meat,” she would not be heard. But if she went as a representative of these white people and said, “This is not good enough,” they’d pay attention.⁷

In terms of career goals, the expectations of Morrison’s parents were consistent with those for women in general. In a 1981 interview she said, “They assumed that all my life I should work. And I guess they assumed that I should get married. It never occurred to me that I could get married and not work. What was needed was skill. I had an uncle who had gone to college, and I was surrounded by people who had done extraordinary things under duress in order to survive.”⁸ Morrison grew up in a family that embraced a strong work ethic, and she was surrounded by role models such as her father. It is not surprising that Morrison, after completing her undergraduate degree, made gaining an advanced degree, rather than marriage, a priority.

THE 1950s AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Morrison graduated from Howard in 1953 and entered Cornell University that fall. By that time, the country had begun moving along a long, painful, and often violent road to desegregation. In 1950 the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against classroom and social segregation in the McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents case had a direct effect on African Americans in higher education.⁹ In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas). In overturning Plessy v. Ferguson—the 1896 case in which the Court found that “separate but equal” facilities are constitutional, the Court ruled that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.

This ruling might have opened up many new teaching opportunities for some of the more than thirteen thousand African American women and men who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1953¹⁰ had it not been for the tremendous and often violent resistance to it, especially in the southern states. In the North many colleges and universities were opposed to admitting African American students to their graduate programs, although their resistance was not as virulent as that of institutions in the South. Morrison might well have chosen Cornell for her graduate studies because of the university’s long history of trying to provide a quality education for women and people of color, and because a member of Howard University’s Board of Trustees, Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, did her graduate work there.¹¹

Morrison graduated from Cornell just months before a heinous crime in Mississippi turned the international spotlight on the serious racial problems of the United States—the torture, mutilation, and murder of a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago named Emmett Till. In August 1955 Till, during a stay with his uncle in Tallahatchie County, allegedly either whistled at or propositioned the wife of a white store owner, Roy Bryant. A few nights after the incident, Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, went to Till’s uncle’s house and demanded that he be turned over to them. A few days later Till’s badly beaten and mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milam were tried for murder and acquitted by an all-white male jury. Both the trial in Mississippi and Till’s funeral in Chicago received international media coverage.¹² His mother’s insistence that the casket remain open was effective in rousing antilynching sentiment. For most African American people, this crime was not merely a murder: it was a lynching. The difference was that the murder was not performed in the public, communal, and ritualized manner that was common in the South during the 1930s. Bryant, Milam, and their accomplices accomplished their deed away from witnesses. The intensity of the international public outcry not only had to do with the violent nature of the crime against a child; thoughtful people around the world criticized the government and the American judicial system for not doing enough to protect the rights of its African American citizens. African Americans in rural Mississippi were disfranchised and therefore could not serve on juries. In the aftermath of the Till lynching and several other less publicized murders of African American men during the four years that followed, African Americans in Mississippi and in other areas of the rural South lived under constant threat of violence from whites.

The image of Till’s face, beaten and swollen beyond recognition, was seared onto the memories and imaginations of people, young and old, for many, many years. His death was written about by journalists, poets, and novelists alike. The death of Till motivated many young black people to become involved with the Civil Rights movement.¹³ Rosa Parks helped to put the movement into motion when, just a little more than three months after the death of Till, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to give her seat up to a white man. The hope of the many people who were mobilized in Montgomery and elsewhere in the South was that through nonviolent protests the country could be forced to acknowledge, respect, and protect the rights of African Americans as a first step to a fully integrated society.

THE 1960s

In the wake of several events—the murder of Till, the Montgomery bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. to international fame, the 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing racial segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and the 17 May 1957 prayer pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., organized by King and the African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph—many students at Howard University became dissatisfied with programs of study that they felt were not relevant to the needs of African Americans. By 1962 a more militant tone was being sounded at Howard. Tom Myles, an alumnus who was a major player in student activism, summed up the problem in his photographic history of student demonstrations at Howard:

Black students came to understand that the University was neither responsible to nor accountable to black people. It had concerned itself primarily with its role as an escape hatch for the few Negroes able to afford its services. This is not surprising since it was just a few years ago that the emphasis was on integration as the mechanism through which Negroes could escape all the stigmas assigned to them by whites. And it was thought that educated Negroes were what was needed to make integration work. The lesson had not yet been learned. But in the process of educating Negroes to be acceptable to whites, far too many of them became polarized against their own people. And the University was the prime agent.¹⁴

A direct result of the student-protest movements in the South and the violence they engendered in racist whites was the development of a new black consciousness among black college students who demanded a new kind of education. As Myles boldly stated,

black students clearly understand now that the construction of a new black consciousness which will serve the needs of black people must begin with the schools, colleges, and universities. Universities in which the majority of the students are black have a special obligation to transform themselves into universities in which the curriculum is relevant to and addresses itself to the special problems of black people living in what has now been officially declared a racist society.”¹⁵

Among the leaders of the campus protest movement who were committed to this radical reorganization of Howard University and the development of a new black consciousness among its students was one of Morrison’s students, Stokeley Carmichael, who popularized the slogan, “Black Power!”

According to Morrison, Carmichael was “the kind of student who makes average grades, but he was clever in class, the kind of student who made others respond. He was a wonderful, welcoming presence. In 1964 when he was graduating, I said, ’Stokeley, where are you going now?’ and he said, ’I’ve been accepted at Union Theology Seminary.’ He was going to study theology, but first, he was going to Mississippi to work for one summer in the field.”¹⁶ As a member of the Howard Non-Violent Action Group, Carmichael “appeared before the Congressional Subcommittee of the Equal Employment Commission on Civil Rights to protest discriminatory hiring practices of Craft Unions building the University’s new gymnasium.”¹⁷ In 1966 Carmichael was elected chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Formed in 1960, SNCC was an interracial activist organization committed to carrying out nonviolent voter-rights campaigns and civil-rights demonstrations throughout the South, particularly in Mississippi, where African Americans, often under the threat of death, were denied the right to vote. Under the leadership of Carmichael and others the organization had by 1966 become very militant and adopted a separatist policy that led to the exclusion of white participants.¹⁸

The seeds of black cultural nationalism that had begun to take root nationwide in the early 1960s spread to the campus of Howard before Morrison left for Europe in 1964. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were assassinated. Four girls were killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. James E. Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three civil-rights workers, were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. In light of these events and the continuing violence against African Americans that they witnessed daily on their televisions, students at Howard grew increasingly militant and frustrated with an administration that refused to hear their demands for change. The assassinations in 1965 of Malcolm X, the racial violence that spread through the major cities in 1967, the assassination in 1968 of King, and the raging war in Vietnam further fueled discontent at Howard, leading to the protests that Myles documents. The protests culminated in the student takeover of an administration building in 1968. The university was finally forced to change.

Morrison admits that she was not politically engaged while she was teaching at Howard, although many of her students were involved in the movement. Her attention was diverted to her personal life. She had given birth to her first child in 1961. She also was not in favor of integration. As she explained to Rosemarie K. Lester during a 1983 interview,

1 knew the terrors and the abuses of segregation. But integration also meant that we would not have a fine black college or fine black education. 1 didn’t know why the assumption was that black children were going to learn better if they were in the company of white children. Since that time I’ve seen other things happen where there were black separatists who said, “we don’t want to have anything to do with white people.” I was always on the other side of the mirror of the moment, busing and such. In my heart, I didn’t like it. But I knew that the racists also wanted segregation for their purposes… . What I thought ought to happen was that the money should be there for the materials for education, for the fine faculty, and so on… . Put the money into black neighborhoods, get it there, and we will produce our own excellent faculty, curricula, etc.”¹⁹

Despite her reservations about enforced desegregation in public education, when Morrison took a job in 1965 with L. W. Singer, she realized that the pressure the Civil Rights movement was putting on schools to revise their curricula offered her an opportunity to help “make some changes.”²⁰ The greatest and most rapid changes came from student protests similar to the ones at Howard, Cornell, Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California at Berkeley. By 1970 several of these and other colleges and universities had yielded to pressure from students to institute Afro-American studies programs and to revise the undergraduate curricula to include courses about African Americans.

THE 1970s

As programs in Afro-American studies became more formalized during the 1970s, a distinct gender bias became apparent, at least from the perspective of African American women scholars and writers. The programs were administered mainly by men and most of the works included on course reading lists were by and about African American men. African American women scholars and teachers, some of whom experienced sexism in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and racism in the new feminist movement, found themselves fighting an uphill battle as they tried to remedy a situation that they felt was detrimental to the development of Afro-American studies as an academic discipline—the exclusion of African American women. Among the problems they encountered was the paucity of materials in print by and about African American women. African American women were not getting published at the rate of their male peers.

Morrison’s most significant contributions to the changes occurring around her were in the field of publishing. Over the course of the twenty years she worked as an editor at Random House in New York City, Morrison came to be known and respected as a major force behind the books the company published by black writers. She helped to guide the careers of Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Lucille Clifton. Morrison was particularly proud of having published posthumously most of the work of Henry Dumas, whom she called “the best naturally talented, no-holds-barred writer I have ever published.”²¹ She edited the autobiography of Muhammad Ali, described by Morrison as “absolutely as fascinating as he says he is.”²² She found Davis to be “very committed and selfless but without that abrasive quality that many committed people have.” Morrison added, “She’s the genuine article.”²³

In addition to her writing and editorial work Morrison frequently wrote articles and reviews for The New York Times during the 1970s. Her 1971 article, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” offers insights into why mainstream feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) failed to attract African American women. She explains why African American women, if they respond to feminism at all, do so with distrust:

In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling them. They don’t want to be used again to help somebody gain power—a power that is carefully kept out of their hands. They look at white women and see them as the enemy—for they know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country, and that 53 per cent of the population sustained an eloquent silence during times of greatest stress. The faces of those white women hovering behind that black girl at the Little Rock school in 1957 do not soon leave the retina of the mind.²⁴

Aside from their general distrust of the feminist agendas as defined by NOW founder Betty Friedan and other mainstream feminists, African American women felt that feminism did not speak to their realities and practical needs.²⁵ As Morrison points out, black women were less concerned with getting into the workforce than with being upgraded to better-paying jobs. Their educational needs were different. While white women were fighting to get into medical school, black women’s more immediate educational needs were more likely to be adult education programs. More important, black women were not concerned with “how to exercise freedom from the head of the household,” but in how to be head of the household.²⁶

Morrison also comments on stereotypes or what she refers to as “archetypes” such as the comedian Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine, and Sapphire from Amos and Andy. She argued that these “are the comic creations of men.” As stereotypes they were distortions, but underneath their comic veneer there were some truths about the strength of black women. Morrison discusses at length the impact of feminism on interracial relations between black men and white women before concluding on a more hopeful note that, as more black women such as Democratic representative to the U.S. House of Representatives Shirley Chisholm and the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer got involved with women’s liberation, it would become “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights—something other than a family quarrel”²⁷ between white women and white men, something that would benefit a broader group of women than those on the membership lists of NOW.

THE 1980s AND 1990s

During the 1980s and 1990s African Americans were more engaged than ever in the economic, political, and cultural arenas of the United States. The 1990s particularly can be called the best of times for African Americans in light of their earlier history. As Orlando Patterson illustrates in The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (1997), “Afro-Americans from a condition of mass illiteracy fifty years ago, are now among the most educated groups of people in the world, with median years of schooling and college completion rates higher than those of most European nations.”²⁸ Among those graduating from college during the 1990s, women out-numbered men two to one. Their presence in universities and their demand for courses by and about black women helped to boost sales of African American fiction. In 1993 alone, African Americans spent an estimated $178 million on books.²⁹ After the long and hard struggle toward integration, millions of African Americans in the 1990s moved into the economic middle class and used some of their so-called disposable income for their own cultural enrichment and that of their children. In the 1980s and 1990s African Americans received more awards for their contributions to art, literature, and music than ever before. Toni Morrison’s selection for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993 was a crowning achievement for a literary tradition that was a little more than two hundred years old before Morrison went to Oslo, Norway, to accept her prize.

If a single era could be singled out as a defining moment in a writer’s career, at least in terms of the volume of her writing and the number of awards and other recognition bestowed on her, for Morrison, it would be the decade of the 1990s. After writing seven novels, creating pieces for theater and the concert stage, and participating in contentious debates over the trial of O. J. Simpson, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and immigration, Toni Morrison at the end of the 1990s had won for herself a place among the world’s most gifted intellectuals. She is even the topic of a debate between two characters in Rebecca Gilman’s 2000 play, Spinning into Butter. The play deals with racism at a small college in Vermont. It focuses on the campus administrators and their ineptness in dealing with a racial problem involving a black student. It focuses especially on the dean of students, Sarah Daniels, and her efforts to come to terms with the racism beneath her liberalism. To show how hopelessly lost she is, Daniels tells her colleague Ross that she once got drunk at a faculty Christmas party and told an English professor that she hates Toni Morrison. Ross asks her why. Daniels replies, “Her books suck.” She particularly hates Morrison’s Beloved. She tells Ross, “Stylistically it’s a mess. It’s like a sloppy first draft.” Ross accuses Daniels of “imposing traditional standards” on the novel, to which Daniels replies, “I know why I’m supposed to like her, but I don’t. And I don’t think that hating Toni Morrison makes you a racist. I just know that other people think it makes you a racist.”³⁰ Expressing her hatred of Morrison is Sarah Daniels’s way of unburdening herself of her own racial problems. Gilman, by introducing Morrison in her characters’ conflicts, underscores the importance of Morrison’s novels for ongoing discussions between blacks and whites over what W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), identified as the problem of the twentieth century—the problem of the color line.

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1993), p. 12.

2. Lois Rita Helmbold, “The Depression,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Ter-borg-Penn, volume 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 328.

3. Colette Dowling, “The Song of Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 30.

4. Claudia Dreifus, “Chloe Wofford Talks about Toni Morrison,” New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1994, p. 73.

5. Charles H. Thompson, “The Relative Enrollment of Negroes in Higher Educational Institutions in the United States,” Journal of Negro Education, 22 (Summer 1953): 439.

6. Jeanne L. Noble, The Negro Woman’s College Education (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 116-117.

7. Dreifus, p. 73.

8. Charles Ruas, “Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 98.

9. Sharon Harley, The Timetables of African-American History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in African-American History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 263-264.

10. This figure is based on Noble’s estimate for 1950. See The Negro Woman’s College Education, Appendix D, Table 2.

11. For a history of the efforts of Cornell University to provide education for women and people of color, see Charlotte Williams Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).

12. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp. 33-50.

13. Ibid., pp. 91-96.

14. Tom Myles, Centennial Plus 1: A Photographic and Narrative Account of the Black Stu-dent Revolution, Howard University 1965-1968, edited by J. L. Pinderhughes (Washington, D.C.: Black-Light Graphics, 1969), p. 23.

15. Ibid., p. 9.

16. Rosemarie K. Lester, “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: Hall, 1988), p. 51.

17. Myles, p. 9.

18. William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 119-126.

19. Lester, p. 51.

20. Ibid.

21. Jessica Harris, “Toni Morrison: I Will Always Be a Writer,” Essence, 1976: 56.

22. Ibid., p. 90.

23. Ibid., p. 90.

24. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1971, pp. 14-15, 63-64, 66.

25. See Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963).

26. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” p. 15.

27. Ibid., p. 66.

28. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997), p. 21.

29. See Carolyn M. Brown, “Writing a New Chapter in Book Publishing,” Black Enterprise, vol. 25, February 1995, pp. 108-116.

30. Rebecca Gilman, Spinning into Butter (New York: Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. 79-80.