Toni Cade Bambara

Biography

Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey. In 1970 she changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara, after finding the name written on her great-grandmother's notebook among her belongings.

Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959, then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree at City College, New York in 1964, while serving as program director of Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. She has also worked for New York social services and as a recreation director in the psychiatric ward of Metropolitan hospital. From 1965 to 1969 she was with City College's Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge-program. She taught English, published material and worked with SEEK's black theatre group. She was made assistant professor of English at Rutgers University's new Livingston College in 1969 and continued until 1974. She was also visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Emory University and at Atlanta University (1977), where she also taught at the School of Social Work (until 1979). Bambara was writer-in-residence at Neighborhood Arts Center (1975–79), at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri (1976) and at Atlanta's Spelman College (1978–79). From 1986 she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia.

Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s. She went on propaganda trips to Cuba in 1973 and to Vietnam in 1975. She moved to Atlanta, U.S. with her daughter, Karma Bene, and became a founding member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers.

Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at the age of 56 in Philadelphia, PA.

Writing

Her first book was Gorilla, My Love (1972), which collected 15 short stories, written between 1960 and 1970. Most of the stories in Gorilla, My Love are told from a first-person point of view. The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring. Bambara called her writing upbeat fiction. Included were "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" as well as "Raymond's Run" and "The Lesson".

Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts movement and the emergence of black feminism. Her anthology The Black Woman (1970), with poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. While Bambara is often described as a "feminist," in her chapter entitled "On the Issue of Roles", she writes: "Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood."

Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) centers on a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child (or "If Blessings Come" - the title of the manuscript) 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).

Her 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, especially The Salt Eaters. Her script for two awards-winning Louis Massiah film The Bombing of Osage Avenue dealt with the massive police assault in Philadelphia on the headquarters of the black liberation group MOVE, at 6221 Osage Avenue, on May 13, 1985.

Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writings, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African-American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. She was always influenced by the people of Harlem and by her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter (an established painter) to be proud of African-American culture and history.

Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.

Bambara was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2013.

Fiction

Academic

Anthologies

Produced screenplays