Toni Cade Bambara

Miltona Mirkin Cade was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1939 in Harlem, New York, the daughter of Walter Cade and Helen Brent Henderson Cade. Her parents named her Miltona after Milton Mirkin, her father's employer. She spent her first years in Harlem, where her mother, who had known the neighborhood in its Renaissance years, urged her children to daydream, read, and write. At six the child renamed herself Toni; decades later she took the surname Bambara after finding it inscribed among her great-grandmother's belongings.

She graduated from Queens College in 1959 with a degree in theater arts and English, and worked as a social investigator at a Harlem welfare center before teaching in City College's SEEK program. In 1970 she edited The Black Woman: An Anthology, an early collection gathering the voices of African American women on questions the civil rights and women's movements had left unspoken. It announced a writer devoted to community and to the dignity of Black life.

Her fiction followed swiftly. The story collections Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) caught the cadences of everyday Black speech, and her novel The Salt Eaters (1980), a meditation on healing and wholeness, won the American Book Award. After moving to Atlanta she taught, mentored emerging writers, and founded the Pamoja Writers' Collective.

In her later years she turned to film, teaching at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia and writing the 1986 documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue, on the police assault against the MOVE organization. She died of colon cancer on the ninth of December 1995. Toni Cade Bambara remains honored as a keeper of Black voice, a healer through story, and a teacher who lifted others as she rose.