#african-american history

Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

-Shirley Chisholm, first African-American woman elected to U.S. Congress

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.  

(Beloved, 1987)

Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019) - women in history(40/?)

Toni Morrison was an American writer who was known for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience). She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993. 

Toni published her first book, The Bluest Eyes, in 1970 in which she talks about a black girl who is obsessed with white beauty standards. In 1973, her book Sulafollowed.Song of Solomon came out in 1977; in this book, Toni intruduces her first male protagonist and she blends African American folklore and history in a book about the search for identity. Ten years later the critically acclaimed Belovedcame out. In this work, Toni tells a story, based on true events, of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. This book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Toni wrote many other books, in which she talked about many aspects, important to the black community, such as a Black utopian community (Paradise, 1998).

What is always central in the works of Toni Morrison is the Black American experience: her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.