Toni Morrison's Lorain

Toni Morrison’s The Black Book (1974) is a visual scrapbook and historical archive that documents approximately three hundred years of African American history and experience. Unlike conventional history books, The Black Book presents an expansive visual panorama accompanied by relatively minimal explanatory text. Through this form, Morrison sought to challenge the common tendency to frame Black history primarily through slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, a structure that has long shaped mainstream historical education.

In her essay “Behind the Making of The Black Book,” Morrison explains her motivation for creating and publishing the volume. The following excerpt illustrates how members of earlier generations pursued forms of self-education outside conventional institutions and formal curricula. Such practices, although significant to the preservation and transmission of historical knowledge, are not easily captured in official statistics or conventional historical studies. The essay was originally published in the Black World, vol. 23 (February 1974): 86-90.

"The assumption about our reading habits is based on the fact that few Black people had more than a few years of primary schooling and that reading at the sixth-grade level is not reading at all. (In spite of the fact that the New York Times is written at the sixth-grade level- most other newspapers at the fourth grade- and that going to school for Black people had nothing to do with the ability to read.) My grandfather went to school for one day: to tell the teacher he would not be back. Yet all of his adult life he read greedily, as did his uneducated friends."