On a par with Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Mari Evans, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison has proven that African-American women writers no longer command only a black audience but can hold white readers' interest and earn their respect while lessening their ignorance of the black race. With the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison began setting records for achievements, beginning with a National Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award in 1975 and advancing to an appointment to the National Council on the Arts in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.
The first black female to produce a Book-of-the-Month Club key selection, Morrison won a $3,000 stipend from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, three consecutive Public Library Books for the Teen Age, and awards from the New York State Governor's Arts Council, City College of New York Langston Hughes Festival, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. As evidence of her substantial presence in the literary world, in 1981 Morrison was invited to address the American Writers' Congress.
In January 1988 (only a few months after James Baldwin died unsung in American literary circles), Morrison was nominated for Ritz-Hemingway, National Book, and National Book Critics Circle awards but won none of them. Led by poet June Jordan, a formal protest ran in major newspapers, accompanied by an open letter from Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Angela Davis, and 42 other black colleagues who decried the slight of Morrison's accomplishment. Morrison's supporters argued that she advances "the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people." Critic Houston A. Baker labeled the action a "civil action" designed to call attention to a "miscarriage of judgment." He explained, "We wanted to call the attention of others to this ignoring of the beauty and greatness of Morrison. This is egregious."
