Toni Morrison's Lorain

When news of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature reached Lorain in October 1993, Lorainites and people who knew the author strongly wanted to honor her and keep her legacy in Lorain. This letter claimed that Lorain High School should be named after the author. It was publised on November 5, 1993, in the Morning Journal.

To the editor:

Toni Morrison has brought great honor to her native city, Lorain. It is only fitting that Lorain bestow the Nobel laureate with an honor of like magnitude. What greater tribute could Lorain offer than to rechristen the high school from which Morrison was graduated in 1948, Lorain High School, as Toni Morrison High School.

No person is more deserving of such honor. True, Lorain High has had its share of distinguished or notable graduates—from World War II warrior Admiral Ernest J. King to satirist/comedian Don Novello. But no other alumnus has reached the pinnacle in her profession that Morrison has in hers.

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, she is in exalted company. As the winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, she stands with Pearl Buck as one of only two American women to be so honored and recognized.

Lorain has a long tradition of recognizing its warriors and its athletes. Let it now give its due to one of the geniuses who contributed to human understanding.

By naming schools after Whittier, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Irving, Lorain has seen fit to honor great writers of another American time and place. Toni Morrison has taken her place among those hallowed names, but more impressively she stands for this time and this place. Morrison, as a woman—a black woman—represents the America and the Lorain of the late 20th century in all its ethnic diversity, its tolerance, its openness to new ideas and differing viewpoints, and its recognition that all the great ideas in the world do not spring from the minds of men.

Dave Golowenski, Sudbury, OH
Lorain High School Class of 1967