Toni Morrison as Visionary Editor: “Black People Talking to Black People”

By | On June 19, 2025 | Comments (0)
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye author portrait,1970)

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, 1931 – 2019) is celebrated for her groundbreaking novels and nonfiction that examine the Black experience in America.

Her writings have reached millions of readers, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for the “visionary force and poetic import” of her work. [above right, Toni Morrison’s author photo on The Bluest Eye, 1970; photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Following is an overview of her career as an editor and publisher, which isn’t as widely known despite being hugely influential in the contemporary realm of Black literature and the publishing world.

 

A mix of roles: teacher, publisher, and editor

Morrison took on several roles during her career, most obviously as a writer, but also as a teacher, publisher, and editor. She didn’t view them as separate, but as different facets of working with books, and said that she could never imagine just writing.

“I went once with a friend to the country,” she said in an interview at Bryn Mawr, “and we said we would just stay a week or two and write, and both of us brought back blank pieces of paper. I just looked at the deer, you know; nothing happened.”

She described writing as the work she could not live without but also took “huge joy” in her work as an editor. “My effort is not to erase the conflict between editing and writing but to pay full attention to the editing and to pay full attention to the teaching … I don’t think that I’m the kind of person who can write without that kind of mix.”

Her editing career wasn’t initially born out of passion but out of necessity. In the late 1960s her marriage had broken up; she had children to care for and bills to pay. She needed a job and applied to Random House after seeing an ad on the back of the New York Times Book Review.

She started at their Syracuse office in 1967, becoming the first African American woman to do so (and one of only a handful working in publishing generally).

Her work caught the attention of Robert Gottlieb, then editor-in-chief at Knopf, and Jason Epstein, the editorial director. In 1970 she was promoted to trade editor at the Random House New York office.

 

“Black people talking to Black people”

At the time, the vast majority of fiction published by commercial publishing houses was by white authors. What Morrison called “the shelf” – the tradition of African American literature in America – was scattered and fragmented, and she believed that the general handling of Black authors was poor, with substandard editing and little to no marketing or publicity.

She was determined to make a change, and wanted her presence as an editor to reassure a Black author that “somebody is going to understand what he’s trying to do, in his terms, not in somebody else’s, but in his.”

She focused on writers who had been excluded from and marginalized within mainstream publishing: “We’ve had the first rush of Black entertainment, where Blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where Black people are talking to Black people.”

One of her first successes, The Black Book (1974) ,was an anthology of Black history spanning from the earliest days of enslavement through the twentieth century. It used essays, letters, drawings, songs, and photographs to tell the story of Black people by Black people; Morrison called it “a genuine Black history book – one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.”

 

Breaking new ground in publishing

Morrison’s list grew extensive. She published and promoted a vast range of work by Black authors, including autobiographies by Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, as well as fiction and poetry by Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambera, June Jordan and Gayl Jones.

What they all shared, in Morrison’s words, was that same vision of The Black Book: “the kind of information you can find between the lines of history. It sort of falls off the page, or it’s a glance and a reference. It’s right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with names.”

Her friend Erroll McDonald, executive editor at Pantheon, said that Morrison “had a sense of mission … the books that she tended to acquire were books of political and social moment … So many of the books were responsive to the times. She saw herself as having not only a literary mission but a social mission as well.”

Morrison herself said that she “wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything, I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure that there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line.”

Morrison’s editing was as daring as her writing, and many of the books that she championed and published were groundbreaking in their focus and subject. Gayl Jones’ 1975 novel Corregidora, for example, was a slave narrative that focused on the history of slavery as it impacted generations of Black southern women and their relationships with each other — as opposed to their relationship to whiteness and white people.

To a certain extent it foreshadowed Morrison’s novel Beloved, and echoed her own preoccupations in her writing. It was also incredibly bold and daring for the time, and after reading it Morrison reportedly said that, “no novel about any Black woman could be the same after this.”

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Toni Morrison in her New York home, photo by Bernard Gottfryd

Toni Morrison in her New York home, 1980s.
Photo by Bernard Gottfryd, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Creating connections between Black authors

Morrison fostered a close relationship with those writers she worked with. The correspondence between her and Lucille Clifton (regarding Clifton’s book Generations) reveals the editing process as a dialogue, a creative endeavor between two brilliant women.

She also encouraged connections between the writers she published and promoted. In May 1972, she wrote to thank Clifton for agreeing to read some stories by Toni Cade Bambera: “I think they are stunning – and hope you will too.” Clifton’s words were later published on the back of Bambera’s collection Gorilla, My Love: “She has captured it all, how we really talk …She must love us very much.”

 

The importance of the art of editing

Morrison believed wholeheartedly in the importance of editing, and of finding not just a good editor but the right one for the work. In an interview with The Paris Review, she said, “The good [editors] make all the difference. It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone.”

She also believed that, for Black authors, the process of writing and editing was not just an act of creation, but of resistance and pride. Language itself, for Morrison, could be a challenge to racism and prejudice. Asked how Black writers could “write in a world dominated by and informed by their relationship to a white culture” she responded: “By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress it and confine it, but to open it up. Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.”

This was a view that she brought to all her work, and encouraged in the authors that she published. Angela Davis, after working with Morrison on her autobiography, said, “Toni Morrison persuaded me that I could write it the way I wanted to; it could be the story not only of my life but of the movement in which I had become involved.”

For many people, Morrison’s passion and determination were inspiring “Part of her allure for me,” Erroll McDonald said, “is that she described possibilities, not only for writers of color but publishers of color … When you saw her doing what she was doing, you felt hope in a barren landscape.”

 

Difficulties within the publishing world

Morrison’s position as an editor was never without its challengess. She faced racism within Random House and the wider publishing industry; there was occasional tension with some of her Black colleagues who disagreed with her decisions.

When she published a collection of poetry by the murdered Black writer Henry Dumas, for example, her edition failed to acknowledge prior publications, including in Black World. The editor of Black World at the time, Carole Parks, wrote to Morrison saying, “It’s not just that you have given people absolutely no inkling that a Black publication gave Dumas his first national exposure. It’s that you have at the same time added to the myth that Black genius would languish unappreciated were it not for some white liberal or far-sighted individual like yourself.”

There were also economic and cultural challenges as publishing continued to transition from art form to business. At the 1981 American Writers Congress, at which she gave the keynote speech, Morrison said, “The life of the writing community is under attack … Editors are now judged by the profitability of what they acquire rather than by what they acquire, or the way they acquire it.”

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Beloved by Toni Morrison

10 Fascinating Facts about Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison’s far-reaching legacy

Toni Morrison resigned from Random House in 1983. In the preface to her novel Beloved, she wrote, “Leaving was a good idea. The books I had edited were not earning scads of money … My enthusiasm, shared by some, was muted by others, reflecting the indifferent sales figures.”

She had already made an immeasurable contribution to Black writing and to Black publishing, and to the “shelf” of Black literature in America and beyond. As Arielle Grey has stated, “the books she edited and published went out into the world and forever changed it.”

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.

Further reading

Categories: Literary Musings

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