Celebrating the Life, Legacy and Literature of Toni Morrison
The Spelman Community Reflects and Pays Tribute to a Literary Legend
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison | 1931 - 2019
Generations of Spelmanites have studied and admired Toni Morrison's work and have been changed by her words. In various public forums, alumnae, faculty, students and friends have shared their love and respect for the woman whose words were life and breath.
Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell Remembers Morrison
Excerpts from the
President's Letter to the Community:
...Ms. Morrison, like Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Pearl Cleage, Stacey Abrams and many others, is one of the high priestesses of Black culture.
Her gift to the students of Spelman is what Ms. Hansberry would call the gift of "sighted eyes, and feeling heart." Faculty at Spelman have been teaching Ms. Morrison almost every academic year; and every year, there is a growing number of devotees. What she teaches is unflinching fierceness in the face of truth. What she inspires is an unfathomable love.
I can hear the sound of her voice, as I read her words ...
"I’m a believer in the power of knowledge and the ferocity of beauty, so from my point of view, your life is already artful—waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art."
Remembering the Life and Legacy of Toni Morrison
Enjoy a conversation on WABE'S "A Closer Look" about Morrison’s impact on the literary world and how Spelman faculty has used her work within their curriculum with
Michelle Hite, Ph.D., associate professor of English, director of the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program and director of International Fellowships and Scholarships.
"A world without Toni Morrison seems bereft of grace and wisdom." -- Dr. Hite
Dr. Michelle Hite Pens AJC Article: "How Morrison Taught us How to Maintain our Composure in a World Falling Apart"
"For Toni Morrison, the novel ["Beloved"] was a site and a source of ancestral wisdom."
"As such, she would have urged us toward the pages of her work as the balm for our despondency before a world that seems to be falling apart.
She would have urged us to read and told us that in doing so, we were tending to the business of creating a better world."
Morrison Memories
"We are the ships that go out to explore uncharted waters and the safe harbors that welcome their return...Spelman women can do it all."
Toni Morrison, Spelman College Commencement Address 1978.
From Peer Review
Our Beloved Journey: Using Storytelling to Foster Faculty Community
By: Karen Brakke, Michelle S. Hite, Azaria Mbughuni, Opal Moore, Bruce Wade and Mona Taylor Phillips
[At Spelman] storytelling has provided an axis for developing summer workshops designed to build an intellectual commons among our faculty by engaging colleagues from diverse disciplines in cross-disciplinary conversations and interdisciplinary projects. The 2012 and 2013 [
Teaching Resource and Research Center] workshops applied a multi-disciplinary approach to the re-reading of Toni Morrison’s novel
"Beloved," bringing together modes of inquiry from several disciplines.
"If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it"
"At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough."
Twitter Posts From the Spelman Community
"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."
"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think."
"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
"...Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."
From Toni Morrison With Love...
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game. '"