Some of her critics were up-
set that she sort of stayed on the
sidelines while the black power
movement was taking off. At the
time, she was an editor at Random
House and saw her role as bring-
ing black literature into the main-
stream. She brought in writers like
Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis,
Gayl Jones, and produced impor-
tant works by Black Panther Huey
Newton and the autobiography of
Muhammad Ali.
“I thought it was important for
people to be in the streets, but they
couldn’t last,” recalled Morrison.
“You needed a record. It would be
my job to publish the voices, the
books, the ideas of African-Ameri-
cans and that would last.”
In addition to the Nobel Prize,
Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for
Beloved in 1988 and a National
Book Critics Circle Award for Song
of Solomon in 1978. In May 2019,
she received the gold medal from
the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. She was awarded the
American Academy of Arts and
Sciences Emerson-Thoreau Medal
Watch Toni Morrison discuss her Nobel Prize announcement
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