by the news of the assassination of President John
Kennedy on November 22, 1963. For Moody and
millions of black Americans, Kennedy had repre-
sented a glimmer of hope.
In May 1964 Moody returned to Mississippi
from her hiatus in Louisiana to participate in
Tougaloo College’s graduation exercises. Before
the graduation she met with old friends from the
movement and decided to join them in a planned
demonstration in Canton. Local law enforcement
officers resorted to violence in attempting to force
the demonstrators to turn around. Moody and
her fellow protestors turned their attention to the
FBI agents who watched and, as usual, did noth-
ing to intervene.
On Sunday May 31, 1964, Moody was awarded
her college degree. She was alone, without any
family to share the occasion. When she returned
to New Orleans, Moody learned that, to save
money to buy her a graduation present, Adeline,
her younger sister, had not attended the gradua-
tion services.
Moody returned to Canton, where she worked
with CORE’s Summer Project. She was invited to
join SNCC’s Bob Moses and others for the Missis-
sippi Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)
hearings that were to be held in Washington, D.C.
COFO was a statewide organization that incorpo-
rated all national, state, and local protest groups
operating in Mississippi. As the bus sped down the
highway, the civil rights activists repeatedly sang
verses of “We Shall Overcome,” while Moody qui-
etly thought: “I wonder. I really wonder” (384).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York:
Dell Publishing, 1968.
Ronald G. Coleman
Morrison, Toni (Chloe Anthony
Wofford) (1931– )
Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Her
parents, George and Ramah Wofford, migrants
from the South, were hardworking members of the
working class. Family life featured storytelling and
music. At age 12, Chloe converted to Catholicism
and adopted the name Anthony, after St. Anthony,
which became shorted to Toni. After graduating
with honors from Lorain High School in 1949,
she went to Howard University. She left Howard
in 1953, with a major in English and a minor in
classics, to attend Cornell University, where, in
1955, she received an M.A. in English. She wrote
her thesis on the fiction of William Faulkner and
Virginia Woolf.
Between 1955 and 1965, she married and was
divorced from Harold Morrison; had two sons,
Harold Ford and Slade Kevin; and taught English
at Howard University and Texas Southern Univer-
sity. After her divorce, she began work as an editor
at L.W. Singer Publishing Company, a textbook
division of Random House. In 1967 she became
a fiction editor at Random House, a position she
held until 1984. As editor, Morrison nurtured the
literary careers of many contemporary African-
American writers, and she edited The Black Book,
a compilation of photographs and primary texts
documenting African-American history. From
1984 to 1989, she taught at the State University of
New York at Albany as the Albert Schweitzer Chair
in humanities and fine arts, and since 1989 she has
been the Robert H. Goheen Professor in humani-
ties at Princeton University.
In the early 1960s, while participating in an
informal writers’ group, she jotted down a short
story about an African-American girl who longed
for blue eyes. Encouraged by the group’s response,
she expanded the story into The Bluest Eye (1970),
an astonishing first novel, although the little criti-
cal attention it received was mixed. It relates not
only the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove’s fantasy but
also the stories of her angry and dispossessed fa-
ther, Cholly; of her self-righteous mother, Pau-
line; of her friend Claudia, who tries desperately
to make sense of what happens; and by extension
of the African-American community in Lorain,
Ohio.
Morrison followed The Bluest Eye with SULA
(1973), which, widely praised, was nominated for
the National Book Award. It tells the story of two366 Morrison, Toni