The great African-American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and fearless social commentator, Toni Morrison passed away on this day, August 5, 2019 – aged 88.
A greatly-missed voice.
Here is her detailed New York Times obituary
(and here, an op-ed, published in the New York Times a few days later, by Angela Davis and Farah Jasmine Griffin – a necessary reminder – “Toni Morrison, Revolutionary Political Thinker”)
More obituary notices – from The Washington Post, The Amsterdam News, NPR, PBS, ABC, the BBC, CBC, The Guardian… The list could go on and on.
A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, in New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine – see here
Listen to her remarkable and moving acceptance speech
– at Cornell – “on language, evil and “the white gaze” (from March 2013)
and at George Washington University – “An Evening With Toni Morrison” (an address given two years earlier)
Here she is in one of many encounters with her good friend, Oprah Winfrey (this from 2000)
In a notorious interview with Australian journalist Jana Wendt, (back in 1998), Morrison is asked why she both “marginalizes” white people in her work and if she’d ever write “sustainably” about white character! Morrison interjects with, “You can’t understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you?”, keeping her composure, although obviously appalled, before carefully breaking it all down for her. See that (and the rest of that interview) here (the interview segment begins at approximately three minutes in)
New York Times journalist, Harrison Salisbury was also on the jaunt and recounts that occasion here
Zhang Jianhong (“Li Hong”), one of the Chinese writers, remembers it from the other side
