1987: Toni Morrison, belle hooks, and the Power of Black Women
Big Idea
Throughout the 1980s, African American writers continued the tradition of incisive commentary of American life and what it meant to be Black in a White-dominated society. The “afterlife of slavery” often lived as a direct or indirect actor in their stories. Black female writers such as Toni Morrison and bell hooks continued the tradition of power through writing and brought to life the complex lives of Black Americans in the twentieth-century.
What’s important to know?
Toni Morrison: Morrison was one of the best writers of the twentieth century, winning multiple prestigious awards and teaching at universities like Bard and Princeton. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She wrote children’s books, plays, and novels.
bell hooks: hooks was an English professor and influential author as well as a leading intellectual on black feminism and social thought. Throughout her career she published more than 40 books that spanned topics from self-help, Black men, and women’s sexuality and freedom.
1: Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison grew up in Lorraine, Ohio — a town her parents had moved to as a part of the Great Migration. She grew to become one of the twentieth-centuries best writers receiving multiple awards and appointments at universities such as Bard and Princeton. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barrack Obama in 2012. Her works spanned from children’s literature, to plays, to novels.
Photograph of Toni Morrison from her first book, The Bluest Eye.
Image Source: Wikipedia
She was the first African American female to become an executive at Random House Publishing in the 1970s where she also helped a number of Black authors get published, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Huey Newton (of the Black Panther Party). She also helped publish the boxing great, Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest: My Own Story. She also helped publish The Black Book, which told the story of Black Americans from the time of slavery through the 1920s using photographs, essays, and illustrations.
She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1977, followed by Sula, Song of Solomon, and probably her most well-known work, Beloved in 1987. (Westenfeld, 2019).
Her first work, The Bluest Eye, was described in The New York Times Book Review as:
Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed specifically to murder possibilities; the "bluest eye" refers to the blue eyes of the blond American myth, by which standard the black-skinned and brown-eyed always measure up as inadequate. Miss Morrison exposes the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our reading primers, and she does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry. (Leonard, 1970).
Her first play was about the murder of 14-year old Emmett Till in Mississippi. Titled Dreaming Emmett Morrison described the project as ''not as a novel, or an essay, but as a play. I wanted to see a collision of three or four levels of time through the eyes of one person who could come back to life and seek vengeance. Emmett Till became that person” (Croyden, 1985).
Of her work, “Patricia Storace wrote, ‘Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature’” (Als, 2020).
Scholar Angelyn Mitchell (2024) described her contributions as: “Morrison's groundbreaking essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1987) and her book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) are both foundational to understanding how race in the United States has "mattered" in the literary arts” (p. 121).
“I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. I really do. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”
Students
Want to learn more? Watch the video below to learn more about the Toni Morrison and how her writings transformed a generation of Black women and writers.
Video from Crash Course Black American History
2: bell hooks
bell hooks noted the influence of Black female abolitionist, Sojourner Truth, on her literary development. Her first published book, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, references Truth’s speech at a Women’s Conference in Akron, Ohio in 1851.
bell hooks, 2009
Image Source: Wikipedia
Like Morrison, hooks was an English professor, influential author, and leading intellectual on black feminism and social thought. Throughout her career she published more than 40 books that spanned topics from self-help, Black men, and women’s sexuality and freedom. She started the bell hooks center at Berea College as a place “where historically underrepresented students can come to be as they are, outside of the social scripts that circumscribe their living” (bell hooks center, 2025).
Writer Crystal Wilkinson (2021) wrote of bell hook’s legacy:
bell showed us that all things were possible for rebellious, bookish Black girls. She reminded us that no matter the prevailing stereotypes of Kentuckians (white, illiterate, poor), no matter the unfinished business of eliminating, as she put it, the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” Kentucky was also a culture of belonging. It was a landscape of thought, memory, imagination, renewal, and connection. She taught us that you can be a Black visionary intellectual from Kentucky and forge a voice of defiance amid—and in order to heal from—segregation, racial hatred, voicelessness, and separation from nature.
Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and the many writers they supported inspired generations of writers, activists, and individuals who found daily inspiration in the knowledge of their own power, excitement, and dignity outside of the White gaze.
Your Turn
How did the writings of Toni Morrison and bell hooks inspire other writers as well as Black women? How has writing played such a critical role in Black development, empowerment, and resistance?
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[edited by] Toni Cade Bambara, with an introduction by Eleanor W. Traylor. (2005). The Black woman: an anthology. Washington Square Press.
Tate, C. (1998). Black Women Writers at Work. Continuum.
Toni Morrison:
Explore Nyack Library’s Virtual Resources: Black American Culture & Art Series:
The Legacy of Toni Morrison.Watch Toni Morrison discuss with Charlie Rose what White people need to do to understand the true impact of racist thinking on White culture.
Atari, B. (2022). Toni Morrison: The Life of a Literary Giant. The Dig. Howard University.
Wajiran, W., & Apriyani, T. (2024). Race, gender, and identity in Toni Morrison’s novels: Relevance to contemporary Black women’s struggles in America. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2024.2442803
Dudley, G. (2020). She Puts Things In: Toni Morrison and the Legacy of Black Women Writers. Emory University Library.
bell hooks:
the bell hooks center at berea college.
Pullen, E. (2021). Where to Start with bell hooks. New York Public Library.
PBS. Becoming bell hooks, video series.
Facing History and Ourselves. bell hooks Taught us to Transgress.
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The Learning Network. (2019). “Her Subject is America: Teaching Toni Morrison With The New York Times.” The New York Times.
Jenn M. Jackson: The (Official) What Black Women Taught Us Syllabus.
Barnard, J. (2023). Teaching with bell hooks. Comp Studies Journal.
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Attempts to ban Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyein Missouri school district.
WashU: Remembering Toni Morrison.
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[edited by] Toni Cade Bambara, with an introduction by Eleanor W. Traylor. (2005). The Black woman: an anthology. Washington Square Press.
Ikard, D., & Scott, L.-T. (2023). “It Ain’t Enough”: Toni Morrison and the Tragic Dark-Skin Girl Motif. Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 11(1), 49–71. https://doi.org/10.5406/23260947.11.1.03
Jackson, J. (2024). Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism. Penguin Random House.
Moffett-Bateau, Alex and Jenn M. Jackson. “Moving beyond Niceness: Reading bell hooks into the Radical Potential for the Discipline,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 43:3, 409-416, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2022.2075681.
Mitchell, A. (2024). Reading Race and Power in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Early American Literature, 59(1), 121–127. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918910
——-. (2002). The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. Rutgers University Press.
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Croyden, M. (1985). Toni Morrison Tries Her Hand at Playwriting. The New York Times.
Leonard, J. (1970). Books of the Times. The New York Times Book Review.
Rothstein, Mervyn (August 26, 1987). "Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women". The New York Times. (Quote from this article.)
Westenfeld, A. (2019). Toni Morrison's Monumental Impact on Literature and Culture Will Be Felt For Centuries to Come. Esquire.
Wilkinson, C. (2019). ‘I Am a Writer Because of bell hooks.’ The Atlantic.