African American

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931, Toni Morrison is one of the most iconic literary figures of the twentieth century. She was born in Ohio, to which her parents, Ramah Willis Wofford and George Wofford, moved in order to escape the racist climate of the US South. I’ll be referring to her by the name by which she is known professionally, Toni Morrison, throughout this piece, but I want to point out that Toni is the nickname, and Chloe Wofford preferred. She writes a lot about being denied one’s true self, and, as naming is a powerful determinant here, I don’t care to be one to let this writer’s true self go unacknowledged. Morrison, then, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993–the eighth woman to be awarded this honour–and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Morrison’s services to literature have not just been through her own fiction, however; she’s edited writers such as Angela Davis, promoting black literature every which way she can.

Billboards proclaiming Black Children Are An Endangered Species have appeared across the city of Atlanta in the last couple of weeks. The poster was created by activist groups Georgia Right To Life and the Radiance Foundation. They claim that black women have three times the number of abortions in comparison to white women in the state and that this is indicative of a eugenics-based conspiracy to deplete the African American population. A conspiracy, they argue, that goes right back to the agitator for birth control, Margaret Sanger, who, they say, would have been happy to hear that 40% of African American women's pregnancies are aborted.