"To Free Someone Else": Toni Morrison the Book Editor

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Books & the Arts / October 6, 2025

A recent book on her career in publishing makes the case that the great American novelist should also be seen as a pathbreaking editor.

In 1979, Toni Morrison addressed the Barnard graduating class and delivered a now-famous maxim: “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” This fragment of a sentence has widely circulated on the Internet as an inspirational quote, but the context for the remark has long since been forgotten. It’s no accident that Morrison spoke these words to the mostly white audience of an elite women’s college, whose students would one day “take your place in the world where you shall decide who shall flourish and who shall wither.” This position of power was almost exclusively reserved for the few white women who came to succeed in male-dominated professions, but at the time of Morrison’s speech, she was intimately familiar with the communal responsibility that came with access to elite institutions.

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Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship

by Dana A. Williams Buy this book

As the only Black woman editor at Random House between 1972 and 1983, Morrison had the power to decide which Black writers received the visibility and resources of a major publishing house. Dana A. Williams’s new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, explores the efforts that Morrison took to make all of her writers feel free to express themselves in an industry that prioritized profit over artistry. As Williams notes, “Author by author, book by book, Morrison was determined to build an editorial identity that mirrored her belief that the cultural terrain was best traversed when every kind of author was given meaningful opportunities for storytelling.”

During her time at Random House, Morrison “was publishing books few other editors would have dared to take on and making it look easy.” Some were bestselling autobiographies of Black celebrity activists like Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali, who wanted to tell stories that were more complex than their overdetermined public images. Morrison edited books by writers who are now considered canonical in African American literature—Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, Barbara Chase-Riboud, June Jordan, and Lucille Clifton, among many others—and who all shared the quality of “defy[ing] neat categorization.” Other books were by lesser-known authors such as Leon Forrest and Chinweizu Ibekwe, who might have escaped mainstream attention—or perhaps may have never been published at all—because of their experimental writing style or the controversial themes in their work. She also published anthologies that represented the diversity of opinions, politics, and aesthetics among people of the African diaspora, pushing back against the idea of a single, essentialist definition of Blackness.

We now know Morrison for her own iconoclastic writing, which earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and firmly cemented her place in the American literary canon. However, Toni at Random highlights the fact that Morrison’s writing was much more than an individual accomplishment. In the midst of the Black Arts Movement, Morrison was one of many writers who were expanding the possibilities of what Black literature could be and do. Her greatest distinction in the 1970s and ’80s was her ability to prop open the door of institutional access for the community of writers to which she belonged.

Morrison’s ability to publish pathbreaking Black writing hinged on her ability to pitch books to the editor in chief at Random House, James Silberman, and then to market them to both Black and white audiences. In Toni at Random, Morrison’s powers of persuasion are demonstrated by archival documents drawn from the Random House Collection at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This little-studied trove of correspondence, interoffice memos, and press briefs offers crucial insight into the way that Morrison protected the integrity of her writers’ projects. She “chose release dates for her Black authors that would conflict the least with the release of other books by Black authors since she knew they would likely get lumped together, no matter their differences in content and style.” She also shielded her writers from the demands often placed on authors by corporate houses: publicity and profitability. For instance, after Angela Davis’s highly publicized flight, arrest, and acquittal, Davis was reluctant to engage in the genre of autobiography, which she said she found too didactic and individualistic. Davis did not want to write a book centering her own story when many of her comrades remained political prisoners for holding the same views. Morrison convinced her that the book could be both “personal and political (there is no difference anyway).” And through the process of editing the book, Morrison rebuffed the efforts of her fellow editor at Bantam Books (which published the paperback version of the autobiography in a joint contract with Random House) to compel Davis to reveal more of her sexual history.

Morrison’s editorial relationship with authors often entered the territory of friendship or mentorship, and her correspondence with them could be encouraging, cajoling, and sometimes reprimanding. Of particular note was her friendship with Toni Cade Bambara. Dubbed “the Two Tonis” by Bambara’s mother, Bambara and Morrison had an intellectual comradeship based on mutual respect for each other’s writing. Morrison recalls that when Bambara was visiting her house on the Hudson River, Bambara would write upstairs, come downstairs for editing advice, and then run back upstairs to implement Morrison’s suggestions. Their editing relationship transcended Morrison’s resignation from Random House in 1983 and Bambara’s death from colon cancer in 1995. In 1996, Morrison compiled the scattered drafts of Bambara’s unpublished final novel and cut them down from 1,800 pages to 669. The resulting draft was published as Those Bones Are Not My Child in 1999. Bambara had begun the novel—which was based on a rash of horrific unsolved murders of Black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981—at the behest of her neighbors in Atlanta, and she had worked feverishly on it for over a decade. Morrison’s final task of editing was an act of love and resolution not just for Bambara but for an entire grieving community.

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Other authors’ responses to Morrison’s editorial advice included avoidance (Muhammad Ali’s ghostwriter avoided her communications for over a year), resistance (multiple authors took umbrage at her extensive line edits and blamed her for issues outside her purview, such as cover design and marketing), and gratitude (Leon Forrest said that Morrison’s edits made his first novel “damn near coherent”). Morrison sometimes played a therapist for authors both illustrious and obscure, as she sympathized with the doubts and squeamishness that were an inevitable by-product of being a Black writer in a publishing industry dominated by the whims of white staff and audiences. After one author apologized for hanging up on her after a disagreement about his book’s jacket cover, she wrote back, “I can never stay angry at people—only institutions.”

In keeping with her prioritization of people over institutions, Morrison tailored her approach to each individual author based on their needs as a person, not just as a writer. Morrison helped Angela Davis choose her outfits for press photos, accompanied Gayl Jones to interviews when she was feeling shy, and got a group of New Orleans chefs an early payment of their author royalties on their best-selling cookbook. This level of individual attention was perhaps not sustainable for someone with her own creative ambitions. Remarkably, Morrison published her first three novels while working as an editor at Random House, but after the success of Song of Solomon (1977), she decided that she wanted “to stop writing around the edges of the day.” She drastically scaled down her list in the late 1970s before she transitioned to full-time writing in 1983. Morrison’s skill as an editor surely made her a better writer, but it undeniably took time and energy away from her own work, and it was never fully appreciated as an intellectual endeavor in itself. In a series of interviews conducted with Morrison before the author’s death in 2019, Williams makes it clear that Morrison’s pride in her editing persisted for decades after she left Random House. “That was hard, important work that no one really talks about,” Morrison told Williams in 2005.

Toni at Random is, if anything, a full and voluminous appreciation of the intellectual labor of Morrison’s editing. Her range is particularly impressive in chapters that shed light on the dynamics around the publication of seemingly dissimilar works. For instance, in a chapter comparing three poetry collections written in the 1970s by, respectively, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, and Barbara Chase-Riboud, Williams unveils a unique point of conflict that Morrison had with her writers. Then as now, poetry collections were rarely top sellers even when they were critically acclaimed. When Chase-Riboud worried that Morrison’s efforts to market her poetry collection might undermine its craft, Morrison wrote to her, “I don’t understand what you are saying about holding a firm line between the work and publicity…. This is a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stockrooms.” After a series of tense exchanges with Morrison, Chase-Riboud relented by admitting that her husband, a French photographer, was fueling some of her anxieties about publicity because “he thinks one should become ‘famous’ like he did by sitting on a sand dune in the Sahara or in a rice paddy in North Vietnam.” Morrison responded graciously, but could not resist a cheeky sign-off: “Love, girl and fuck the sand dunes.”

June Jordan, who preferred writing poetry over more profitable genres like fiction and biography, also sparred with Morrison about what she viewed as her editor’s lack of interest in her work due to delays in hammering out the details of a promised multi-book contract. In reality, Morrison was struggling to convince Random House that Jordan’s work was a viable investment, and she told Jordan bluntly, “Random House (the people whom I must persuade to issue a contract) are not at all interested in publishing your poetry. I am.” The publication of these poets worked against rather than within Random House’s larger vision, and ultimately none of them remained at the press for their future publications. But Morrison’s valuation of Black poetry demonstrated “her commitment to publishing Black literature that took artistic risks, not simply Black literature that would sell.”

Perhaps most reluctant to undertake publicity to sell her books was Gayl Jones, who was only 25 when her first novel, Corregidora (1975), was published to critical acclaim. Williams describes the heartbreaking story of Morrison’s editorial relationship with Jones with sensitivity. Despite (or perhaps because of) Jones’s extreme timidity, Morrison worked even harder than usual to secure blurbs from established Black writers—James Baldwin and Alice Walker, among others—and joined Jones for interviews to support her. However, Morrison ended their editorial relationship after her communications with Jones were hijacked by Jones’s agent turned husband, Robert Higgins, whom Morrison viewed as unstable and controlling. Without Morrison’s publicity efforts, the critical attention to Jones’s work fizzled, and Jones ceased publishing for two decades after her husband’s suicide in 1998. The publication of Jones’s novel Palmares (2021), which she began under Morrison’s editorship in the late 1970s, inaugurated a recent renaissance in her career and a return to the accolades that were garnered by her first novel. However, Williams writes, “the one constant in the promotion of Jones’s new books and in all the stories about her reemergence as a writer was her connection to Morrison, her one-time editor and friend.”

Morrison’s fiction is known for its dense and challenging language, so it may come as a surprise to many that her editorship focused on marketing strategies to make Black writing legible to general audiences. However, the popularity of Morrison’s fiction attests to the idea that marketability and good writing do not have to be at odds. Morrison trusted her audiences, especially Black readers, to recognize quality art. She disagreed with classist notions that Black readers needed to be further educated in order to read or identify good writing. “We know how to appreciate elegance,” Morrison said. “We have always been a very fastidious people.” Her work was to make sure such elegance got into the hands of her own people through tireless promotion. For The Black Book (1974), an anthology of Black visual and print culture, she arranged a series of national radio advertisements read by Bill Cosby, who at the time was one of America’s most respected and well-loved Black television personalities. The book reached the top 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and also reached the Black audiences for whom it was intended, as evidenced by the Black radio show hosts who read excerpts from it on the air, and the incarcerated person who wrote to Morrison requesting additional copies.

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Williams argues that “Morrison’s editorial aesthetic [was] to bring as large an audience as possible [to] explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader.” For example, Morrison edited Boris Bittker’s The Case for Black Reparations (1973), “the first critical response from a mainstream scholar to the question of reparations on the basis of a theory of legal responsibility or liability.” Though the book was written by a white Yale professor, Morrison advocated for the edition to include an essay by the former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, James Forman, in order to make clear that the idea had its roots in Black radical thought. Though Morrison understood that, in the short term, white endorsement was a useful tool for gaining access to material resources, she also understood that it was not the long-term horizon of Black liberation.

This understanding was particularly important given that white critics often misunderstood the books on Morrison’s list, offering tepid and backhanded praise. One review of Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972), for example, contrasted Bambara’s short stories with works by other Black writers. The critic expressed discomfort at the militancy of such authors: “I am tired of being shouted at, patronized, bullied, and antagonized by Black writers…. I dislike being told I’m an insensitive, arrogant, ofay honky who won’t listen.” Morrison certainly had her critiques of the prevailing political aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement (she once praised one of her authors for not writing “another ‘fuck whitey’ treatise”), but she shared its goal of disseminating the work of Black authors to Black readers without conforming to the prejudices of a white audience.

The members of the Black Arts Movement often emphasized Black autonomous presses, periodicals, and artist collectives as a means of giving Black authors more creative control over their own work and more effectively reaching Black audiences with affordable, widely disseminated editions. Morrison’s tenure at Random House was coterminous with the rise of independent publishers like Broadside Press, Third World Press, and Kitchen Table Press, all of which were founded by Black writers. It would be difficult to find a publishing house more synonymous with the hegemony of the white publishing world than Random House, but Morrison advocated fiercely for Black authors within an institution designed to exclude them. The paradox of working within deeply anti-Black institutions to secure some level of safety and security for Black people persists today, and Williams presents an evenhanded portrayal of what Morrison was capable of and what constrained her within the context of corporate publishing.

Toni at Random’s thoroughness sometimes interferes with its readability, making it easy to get bogged down in dates and an obscure cast of editors, agents, and little-known writers that many readers will undoubtedly have trouble remembering. However, in writing the first major study of Morrison’s editorship at Random House, it was important for Williams to thoroughly document the minutiae for future scholarly use, and the details paint a compelling picture of an ecology of Black writers who should be read collectively rather than individually. The book has the added benefit of receiving Morrison’s blessing: She chose the title, shortening Williams’s initial proposal—The House That Toni Built at Random—to the much more succinct and memorable Toni at Random. Always the consummate editor, Morrison’s gift to Black letters lives on in this book.

Marina Magloire

is an assistant professor of English at Emory University. Her first book, We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press.

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