Black History

At 88, Toni Morrison Personifies the Strength of Black Womanhood

NNPA NEWSWIRE — With each masterful stroke of her pen, typewriter or (later) her computer keyboard, Legendary author, Toni Morrison keeps readers of her works and listeners of her words spellbound. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives,” she once said.

Published

5 years ago

February 21, 2019

Oakland Post

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Black Girl Magic, Black Girls Rock, and other slogans have surfaced in recent years to describe the power, resilience and steadiness of the Black woman. But, 88 years ago, a legend was born who would eventually embody the spirit and definition of strength of Black womanhood: Toni Morrison.

“Being, a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it,” Morrison famously said.

With each masterful stroke of her pen, typewriter or (later) her computer keyboard, Morrison kept readers of her works and listeners of her words spellbound. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives,” she once said.

This week, this month and likely throughout Women’s History Month in March, Morrison will undoubtedly be talked about. Her words will flood social media and other platforms, and somewhere a young Black girl will be inspired.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931, Morrison earned a B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953 and a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955.

She later taught at Howard for seven years.

In 1958, while she was teaching at Howard, she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and the couple had two sons before they divorced in 1964.

In 1988, Morrison won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Beloved, which was later adapted for a film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.

Her first novel was The Bluest Eye in 1970. Other celebrated novels include Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Jazz, Paradise, and God Help the Child.

The first Black woman to ever be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Grammy Award, Morrison’s list of accolades are nearly endless.

Some of those awards include:

1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
1988: Helmerich Award
1988: American Book Award for Beloved
1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved.
1989: MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University
1993: Nobel Prize for Literature
1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris
1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
1996: Jefferson Lecture
1996: National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
2000: National Humanities Medal
2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante
2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University
2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee
2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2010: Officier de la Légion d’Honneur
2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement
2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva
2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom
2013: The Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University
2014 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle
2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
2016 The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University
2016 The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by The MacDowell Colony

“At the wisdom-age of 88, the creative courage and genius of Sister Leader Toni Morrison continues to awaken the consciousness of millions of people in America and throughout the world,” said National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) President and CEO Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.

“Morrison personifies what it means to be a long-distance freedom-fighting author. The NNPA salutes and wishes Toni Morrison a happy birthday,” Chavis said.

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Black History

Book Review: ‘The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America’

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping. They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Published

1 day ago

May 17, 2024

Oakland Post

Courtesy of Lisa Frusztajer

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping.

They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Louis Armstrong was born in 1900 or thereabouts in a “four-room frame house on an unpaved lane” in a section of New Orleans called “Back o’Town … the Blackest, swampiest, and most impoverished” area of the city. His mother was a “chippie,” and the boy grew up running barefoot and wild, the latter of which led to trouble. At age twelve, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for recalcitrant Black boys, and that changed his life. At the “home,” he found mentors, father-figures and love, and he discovered music.

For years, Bill “Count” Basie insisted that he’d grown up with “no-drama, no-mystery, and nobody’s business but his,” but the truth was “sanitized.” He hated school and dropped out in junior high, hoping to join the circus. Instead, he landed a job working in a “moving-picture theater” as a general worker. When the theater’s piano player didn’t come to work one day, Basie volunteered to sit in. He ultimately realized that “I had to get out … of Red Bank [New Jersey], and music was my ticket.”

Even as a young teenager, Edward Ellington insisted that he be treated like a superstar. By then, his friends had nicknamed him “Duke,” for his insistence on dressing elegantly and acting like he was royalty. And he surely was — to his mother, and to millions of swooning female fans later in his life.

Three men, born at roughly the same time, had more in common than their ages. Two of them had mothers “who doted” on them. All three were perform-aholics. And, for all three, “Race … fell away as America listened.”

Feel up to a time-trip back a century or more? You won’t even have to leave your seat, just grab “The Jazzmen” and hang on.

In his introduction, author Larry Tye explains why he so badly wanted to tell the story of these three giants of music and how Basie’s, Ellington’s, and Armstrong’s lives intersected and diverged as all three were near-simultaneously performing for audiences world-wide. Their stories fascinated him, and his excitement runs strong in this book. Among other allures, readers used to today’s star-powered gossip will enjoy learning about an almost-forgotten time when performers took the country by storm by bootstrapping without a retinue of dozens.

And the racism the three performers encountered disappeared like magic sometimes, and that’s a good tale all by itself.

This is a musician’s dream book, but it’s also a must-read story if you’ve never heard of Basie, Ellington, or Armstrong. “The Jazzmen” may send you searching your music library, so make note.