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?

1. 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.

2. 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.

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).

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.

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.

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?