date: 2025-10-21
In 1958, she married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison;
Like Morrison’s writing, her editing had a very particular goal: to offer readers stories about blacks, women, and other marginalized characters which hadn’t been told before. This desire—this need—seems to have been with Morrison since she was a student at Howard. In a 2019 documentary about her, “The Pieces I Am,” Morrison recalls that as a student she wanted to write about the black characters in Shakespeare’s plays, but her professor was “outraged” at the idea. As an editor, she chose to bring those black stories to the fore. Now it’s astonishing to look back at the range of her projects: a book on Southern cuisine; a history of the Cotton Club; fiction by Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara; poems by Lucille Clifton and by Henry Dumas, who was killed at thirty-three by a New York City subway cop; the autobiography of Angela Davis; and, in 1974, the historic anthology “The Black Book,” which was reissued in December.
Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed one of her children so that she would not grow up in slavery—a story that haunted Morrison and inspired her 1987 novel, “Beloved,”
Gwendolyn Brooks’s profound poem about abortion, “The Mother”—“Believe me, I loved you all. / Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you / All”—which brings to mind Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (1977)
Their eyes were terrible, made bearable only by the frequency of their laughter.