Toni Morrison Segregation

During the Jim Crow Era, Toni Morrison, a well-known author who revolved her works around the Jim Crow Era, exclaimed her views on segregation through several novels. Toni Morrison has won the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize for her novels and has won almost every book prize possible, along with an extensive list of honorary degrees (Biography.com). Her novels tell stories of several accounts of discrimination and segregation for African Americans who could not speak up against their own rights. Morrison refuses to write about the white community in terms that she would prefer to write outside of “the center”, which refers to the white community as being the center of all literature. Growing up in a life of segregation, Morrison has developed

One way that Morrison intelligently depicts collective voice through her writing is when Sula dies in the year, or chapter, of 1941. At this part in the novel, the majority of the community is pleased to hear about the death of Sula. After Sula is dead and buried, people begin to feel hope for the community and society as a whole, but their hope is crushed when their winters become harsh and ruined. During this time in Winter and after Sula’s death, Morrison states that “Christmas came one morning and haggled everybody’s nerves like a dull ax--too shabby to cut clean but too heavy to ignore.” (Sula 154). This is demonstrative upon the notion that even though the community was overall happy over the death of Sula, their lives were still shattered to the point where no happiness was radiated to each other, even on Christmas. This collective voice of the town is marked by the low spirits of the people and illustrates how the public came together over Sula even though the majority of the people disliked her and used her as a scapegoat towards their own personal issues. As well as in jazz structure, Morrison cleverly and carefully chose her diction as a way to illustrate the scapegoating of Sula. Morrison states that “except for three or four, the fainthearted were put to shame by the more aggressive and abandoned, and

Through the use of these literary writing structures, Toni Morrison depicted Sula and Pecola as racial scapegoats to society and used these characters to her advantage in taking a step forward towards ending segregation. Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner for her novels, made sure to create a legacy for herself in which she attempted to stand against the societal norms in her community. Her words have provided another perspective for the lives of the African American community and have allowed a step towards freedom during the Jim Crow Era. At this point, it is reasonable to understand that Morrison tells a story that no one else tells; she captures and depicts the lives of African American citizens that no one else had the courage to express during this time. Very much like the novels she wrote, she provided a voice to the black community as they did not have it before, but this time, it was not happening in media res. From reading Morrison, people can gain knowledge on how others were treated in older times. This is creating a society that is careful of their actions to be careful enough to not make history repeat itself. Even though Morrison took a step forward towards the ridding of the Jim Crow Era, racism is still prevalent in modernity, but is expressed in different ways. Modern day