Toni Morrison and the Black Radical Tradition
Toni Morrison was widely praised in mainstream circles upon her death. But they failed to note the most enduring part of Morrison's legacy: her enormous contribution to the black radical tradition.
Toni Morrison performs at the Jazz At Lincoln Centers Concert For Hurricane Relief at the Rose Theater on September 17, 2005 in New York City. (Brad Barket / Getty Images)
The final lines of Toni Morrison’s poetic preface to The Black Book read:
I am not complete here; there is much more,
but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take,
ships to name, and crews.
The words are not those of Morrison, who died earlier this month at the age of eighty-eight, but rather the remixed lines of the slain poet and fiction writer Henry Dumas. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Dumas was gunned down in the W. 135th Street subway station by a New York Police Department transit officer. In the eyes of the state, Dumas’s death was unremarkable. There was no published obituary, and the only news story covering the incident was riddled with errors.
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