Toni Cade Bambara Summary

Toni Cade was born on March 25, 1939 in New York, New York. She later added Bambara to her name. The article “Toni Cade Bambara” informs readers, “The name "Bambara," which she later appended to her own, was discovered as part of a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great-grandmother's trunk” (“Toni Cade Bambara”). Bambara’s parents were Walter and Helen Brent Henderson Cade. Helen Cade had lived through the Harlem Renaissance, and was greatly affected by it. Because of this, she strongly encouraged her children’s creativity and any interest in literature. Bambara early education consisted of public and private schools in New York, New Jersey, and the southeast United States. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1959 for theater arts and English from Queens College. This same year, she received her school's John Golden Award for Fiction and a Long Island newspaper's Pauper Press Award for nonfiction. Also in 1959, she was granted publication of "Sweet Town," in Vendome Magazine. This was her first publication.

Though she had a talent for writing,

It is described as “the slums.” The time period is not given, so it can be assumed it takes place around the time it was published, 1972. The 1970s in the United States were a time of chaos and change. The article "Overview: The 1960s and 1970s." sums up the time period with “The push for social reform and opposition to the war in Vietnam led to an upheaval in American intellectual and cultural life that likewise framed these two decades. Young people in particular rejected the patterns of their parents…Protest movements exposed inequities and inequalities in American life, and forced what for some Americans was an uncomfortable process of social and cultural change” ("Overview: The 1960s and 1970s”). The exposing of inequalities in American life is the main purpose of Bambara’s short story “The