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.
