Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 – December 9, 1995), was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.

Early life and education

Miltona Mirkin Cade was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter Cade and Helen Brent Henderson Cade. She lived with her mother and brother, Walter, growing up in the New York metropolitan area. They lived in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens, and Jersey City. At the age of six, she changed her name from Miltona to Toni.

Bambara's mother had lived in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, and she encouraged her children to daydream, read, and write. As a child, Bambara spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library, and was inspired by poems from Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes there. She began writing stories as a child and cited her mother's support of her writing as a large influence on her career. With her new name, she felt it represented "the accumulation of experiences", in which she had finally discovered her purpose in the world. In 1970, Bambara had a daughter, Karma Bene Bambara Smith, with her partner Gene Lewis, an actor and a family friend. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree at City College in 1964. She taught English, published material and directed and advised SEEK's black theatre group, the Theater of the Black Experience. She also served as the faculty advisor for student publications including Obsidian, Onyx, and The Paper. From 1986, she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. As Bambara had become part of the faculty of City College, she strived to make it more inclusive. To do this, she wanted to add more classes, such as a nutrition course, to teach students more about their culture. Bambara also wanted to see a creation of an academy that generated an environment in which students could become more involved in learning more about political and social problems in the community as well as their culture.

Bambara wrote frequently about activism. In her novel, The Salt Eaters, Bambara considers the role of activism within the black community. Additionally, Bambara's essay "On the Issue of Roles," considers the tensions present in black activist spaces. Bambara claims that often, within radical political spaces, there is a reproduction of the binary division between what is considered to be a man and woman's role in revolution. Bambara claims within the essay that, the "either/or implicit in those definitions are antithetical to what [she] is all about, and what revolution for the self is all about." In the essay, she calls for black radical thinkers to abandon the stringent markers of manhood and feminity, and instead invest in Blackhood, that is "an androgynous self, via commitment to the struggle." For Bambara, radical political thought requires unity and alignment via a connected movement for liberation.

Literary career

Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts Movement and the emergence of black feminism. In her writings, she was inspired by New York's streets and its culture, where the culture influenced her due to her experience of the teachings of "Garveyites, Muslims, Pan-Africanists and Communists against the backdrop and the culture of jazz music".

Bambara's 1972 book, Gorilla, My Love, collected 15 of her short stories, written between 1960 and 1970. Most of these stories are told from a first-person point of view and are "written in rhythmic urban black English."

Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) centers on a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. In the novel, minor characters use a blend of modern medical techniques alongside traditional folk medicines and remedies to help the central character, Velma, heal after a suicide attempt. Through the struggle of Velma and the other characters surrounding her, Bambara chronicles the deep psychological toll that African-American political and community organizers can suffer, especially women. While The Salt Eaters was her first novel, she won the American Book Award. In 1981, she also won the Langston Hughes Society Award.

Bambara's novel Those Bones Are Not My Child (whose manuscript she titled "If Blessings Come") was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of 40 black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations (Vintage, 1996).

Bambara's work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African-American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular.

Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writing, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African-American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. Like other members of the Black Arts Movement, Bambara was heavily influenced by "Garveyites, Muslims, Pan-Africanists, and Communists"

  • The Johnson Girls. National Educational Television, 1972.
  • Transactions. School of Social Work, Atlanta University 1979.
  • The Long Night. American Broadcasting Co., 1981.
  • Epitaph for Willie. K. Heran Productions, Inc., 1982.
  • Tar Baby. Screenplay based on Toni Morrison's novel Tar Baby. Sanger/Brooks Film Productions, 1984.
  • Raymond's Run. Public Broadcasting System, 1985.
  • The Bombing of Osage Avenue. WHYY-TV Philadelphia, 1986.
  • Cecil B. Moore: Master Tactician of Direct Action. WHY-TV Philadelphia, 1987.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995)

Death

Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and two years later died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Awards and recognition

In 1959, the year she graduated from college, Bambara earned the Long Island Star's Pauper Press Award for nonfiction.

References

Further reading

  • Cooper, Brittney C. (2017). Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  • Toni Cade Bambara Biography/Criticism, Selected Bibliography. Voices from the Gaps.
  • The Black Arts Movement
  • Malaika Adero, "Resembling a Revolutionary: My Sister Toni", The Feminist Wire, November 21, 2014.