- Kimberley Guillemet
Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Chloe Anthony (“Toni”) Wofford Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She was the second of four children of working-class parents, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and his wife, the former Ella Ramah Wofford, née Willis. When Morrison was two years old her family’s home was set on fire by their landlord while she and her family were in it. “People set our house on fire to evict us,” Morrison later told an interviewer. Morrison went on to state that her father refused to be intimidated by racially motivated hostility.
Morrison’s parents encouraged her early interest in literature, which encompassed Austen, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Her father instilled in her a sense of heritage and language by sharing with her traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and anecdotes he had heard growing up in the south. This nurtured Morrison’s interest in narrative and the African-American folklore tradition.
Morrison graduated with honors from high school and studied humanities at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1955, she earned an MA in English at Cornell University. Thereafter, she taught at Texas Southern University in Houston, and then Howard University. In 1964, after a divorce, Morrison left her position as a professor and moved to New York with her two young sons to join Random House as an editor in the fiction department. She would go on to become the first Black woman senior editor at Random House, a position she held for 20 years. One of her achievements there was, in her own words, developing “a canon of black work” in the fiction genre. In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream.
Eventually, Morrison began writing and publishing fiction pieces of her own. She authored 11 novels, as well as children’s books and essay collections. Her best-known works are the novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987) and the nonfiction volumes Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Remember (2004).
In 1989, following the success of Beloved, Morrison was appointed professor of humanities at Princeton University. She also served as a visiting professor at Yale University and Bard College.
In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for this distinction, and the first Black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category.
A quotation from Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech provides an appropriate epitaph: “We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
To read more about Ms. Morrison’s tremendous life and legacy, please visit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/toni-morrison-obituary, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison. Footage of Ms. Morrison can be viewed at: https://nyti.ms/2lwJZ5a.
- Kimberley Guillemet
In 1912, African-American entrepreneur Willa Bruce and her husband Charles moved from New Mexico to California and bought beachfront property in the strand area of Manhattan Beach for $1,225. Mrs. Bruce wanted to create an area where African Americans could enjoy the ocean. The couple established a resort and named it Bruce’s Beach in honor of Mrs. Bruce.
Under Mrs. Bruce’s leadership, the development included a bathhouse and dining house for African Americans, whose access to public beaches was highly restricted at the time. Before the establishment of Bruce’s Beach, African Americans were not permitted to access the beaches in that region because of racially discriminatory laws and real estate practices. Mrs. Bruce proclaimed to the Los Angeles Times in 1912: “Whenever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort we have been refused. But I own this land and I’m going to keep it.”
By 1920 African Americans who regularly frequented Bruce’s Beach and had moved into the neighborhood surrounding the beach were subjected to harassment by white neighbors and assault by Ku Klux Klan members who set fires or planted liquor on site during Prohibition to get them arrested. In 1924, the Manhattan Beach City Council initiated eminent domain proceedings claiming that Bruce’s Beach property was needed for a public park, despite having recently built Live Oak Park nearby. The Bruces sued the city, but unfortunately the resort was torn down. By 1929, the Bruces settled the case for much less than they had originally sought in the lawsuit. A park was not established until the late 1950s or early 1960s.
In 2006, due to the efforts of Manhattan Beach Councilman Mitch Ward, the city’s first African-American councilman, the property was officially renamed Bruce's Beach. After years of advocacy by the Bruce family descendants and community leaders, in April 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve returning Bruce’s Beach to the family’s descendants. The property to be returned was estimated to be worth $75 million at the time. In June 2021, the California State Senate approved a bill to return the property to descendants of the Bruces. Legislation that prevented the county from transferring or selling the property was eliminated in September 2021 through the legislative approval process. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the legislation later the same month.
Despite not having the land returned to her during her lifetime, Willa Bruce’s vision and entrepreneurship benefitted countless African American residents of her time. She was a trailblazer in the field of commercial real estate and her legacy lives on.
To read more about the life and legacy of Willa Bruce and Bruce’s Beach, please visit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/bruce-family-manhattan-beach.html, and https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tragic-history-of-las-black-family-beach-havens.
- Kimberley Guillemet
Octavia Spencer was born in Montgomery, Alabama on May 25, 1970. She and her six siblings were raised by their mother, Dellsena Spencer, who worked as a maid. Her father died when she was thirteen.
Early on Spencer realized that she had a learning difference. She has recounted being fearful of reading aloud in class from a very young age. “I was paralyzed with fear because I kept inverting words and dropping words. I didn’t want to be made to feel that I was not as smart as the other kids—because I [knew that I was] a smart person.” Spencer would later be diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability.
Despite the challenges she faced with reading, Spencer’s drive and determination catapulted her forward. She credits her mother for keeping her grounded and positive as a child, which was especially helpful when school was challenging. She learned that she had strengths that many of her classmates did not have. She could solve puzzles quicker than her peers and was an incredibly strong auditory learner. Her teachers took notice of her strong deductive reasoning skills and auditory strengths, and ultimately, she was tested and placed in her school’s gifted program.
In high school, Spencer dreamed of working in television and film production. When she learned about a film being shot nearby, she applied for an on-set internship. But applying was not enough for Spencer. She called everyday to inquire about the job. And once she located the production team’s offices, she showed up everyday to reiterate her interest. Her persistence paid off and at 16 years old, she landed her first film job as an intern.
After graduating from Jefferson Davis High School in 1988, she went on to Auburn University, where she majored in English with a double minor in journalism and theater.
Today, Spencer has achieved international acclaim as an actor. Her acting career has spanned more than 20 years, but she is best known for her more recent roles. Some of her films include Hidden Figures, Insurgent, Zootopia and The Help. She’s received many awards, including a Golden Globe and an Oscar.
Spencer is also an author of children’s books and has created and written a book series for middle school students called The Ninja Detective series.
More recently, Spencer fulfilled her childhood dream of working in production when she added the role of producer to her list of achievements.
Even with all of her achievements, Spencer remains humble and true to herself.
“I was a dyslexic child and am a dyslexic adult,” she has said. “That doesn’t really mean that you’re not intelligent—it just means that your brain functions differently.”
Spencer hopes that young people who struggle with any kind of issue won’t give up on their dreams. She has said, “It doesn’t matter your situation in life; your path is what you choose it to be.”
To read more about this inspiring world changer, please visit:
https://www.understood.org/articles/en/celebrity-spotlight-dyslexia-cant-stop-octavia-spencers-success and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Spencer#Early_life. To view footage about her successful career, visit: https://youtu.be/EYhZA454fcE.