Toni Morrison died on August 5th, 2019, at 88 years old. She left behind an immensely powerful legacy, paving the way for black women writers to come. As Roxane Gay wrote in The New York Times, Morrison "broadened the scope of what I thought was possible for myself as a writer and a woman." Writers all over the world recognized the urgency of her voice, not only in speaking to the Black American experience but to the legacies of trauma and violence around the globe. In today's political moment, where divisions are often characterized by allegations of lies and the truth is easily manipulated in service of ideology, Morrison's Nobel Lecture is deeply prescient. In that, she fulfills the role she describes as a writer in the fable: to guide her people with prophecies of the future.
Morrison's work as an editor was equally as important to her contributions to the American canon. As an editor at Random House, Morrison published black writers when no one else thought they were commercially viable. As Angela Davis and Morrison scholar Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin wrote in The New York Times after her death, it is in this editorial work where Morrison's political legacy can be most deeply felt. Without that work, Davis and Griffin noted, we may not have the literary works of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan and Gayl Jones, to name just a few. She also promoted the voices of the Black Power movement, as well as those of the burgeoning women's rights and lesbian studies movements, creating a record of the struggles of her moment.
