Biography Essay

Toni Cade Bambara dedicated her life and her art to realizing positive change and healing in the black community. As writer, filrnmaker, educator, and political organizer, she celebrated the power, beauty, and wisdom of African American culture and its storytelling traditions. Her fiction is distinguished by its emphasis on the African American community, its idiomatic expressions, interpersonal relationships, myths, music, and history. For Bambara art and politics were inseparable. As Toni Morrison once observed, "Any hint that art was over there and politics was over here would break her up into tears of laughter, or elicit a look so withering it made silence the only intelligent response." During the 1960s and 1970s Bambara, like her contemporaries in the Black Arts Movement, immersed herself in the cultural and sociopolitical activities of the urban community, lecturing and helping to organize rallies, while at the same time using these...