Although she grew up in the North, southern traditions played a large part in Toni Morrison’s upbringing. Her maternal grandfather, a Kentucky carpenter and farmer, saw no chance for advancement because of the state’s racism and poverty, so he moved his family to Ohio. From them, Morrison absorbed stories and tales about the horrors of black life during the Reconstruction era—roughly, the twelve years following the Civil War—when the southern states that seceded from the Union were politically restructured and economically restored. She recognized that “whatever I did was easy in comparison with what they had to go through.”
Morrison’s father, sharecropper George Wofford, had similar reasons to escape racial oppression in Georgia and relocate in the North. Even there, however, he distrusted “every word and every gesture of every white man on earth.” In contrast, Morrison’s mother, Ramah, a more educated, trusting person than her husband, was a gentler, less confrontational parent to young Chloe Anthony Wofford, who would become world-renowned Toni Morrison, 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The second of four children, Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, and grew up on the far western fringe of Cleveland, in the multicultural environment of Lorain, Ohio—a steel town of around 75,000, blending Czech, German, Irish, Greek, Italian, Serb, Mexican, and black suburbanites. There, she experienced exclusion but did not suffer the intense racism felt by such black writers as Maya Angelou, Dick Gregory, and Richard Wright.
Brought up in a nurturing, religious environment, Morrison says, “We were taught that as individuals we had value, irrespective of what the future might hold for us.” The women of the black community, whether aunts, grandmothers, or neighbors, served as a tightly woven safety net. The oral tradition, passed down by both men and women, cushioned blows to self-esteem with stories and songs about the Underground Railroad, daring rescues, and other perils and triumphs of black history.
Morrison was expected to excel even though she had to contend with the racial prejudice that accompanied growing up in an educational system that ignored the contributions of nonwhites. At Lorain High School, she graduated at the top of her class, then surprised her family by insisting on leaving Lorain to obtain a college degree—a decision that necessitated her father working three jobs. The move from Ohio alarmed her mother; all of her daughter’s friends and relatives were in Ohio. Self-assured about her ambitions, Morrison has remarked, “You take the village with you. There is no need for the community if you have a sense of it inside.”
Morrison entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., changed her first name from Chloe to Toni, and began studying under strong African-American spokesmen, including poet Sterling Brown and philosopher and critic Alain Locke, a Rhodes scholar who edited The New Negro. She graduated with a B.A. in 1953 and completed a master’s degree in English at Cornell two years later, with a concentration in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.
