Toni Morrison, author of “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon” died late Monday of complications from pneumonia. Morrison came to live in Nyack in 1983, though her home was destroyed in a fire ten years later. Bill Batson helped establish the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench by the Road” monument project in Nyack’s Memorial Park in 2006. Batson says the project honors Morrison’s observation that there were no historical markers to commemorate the lives of slaves in the United States…
In addition to the Nyack bench there are 20 others around the country, including in South Carolina, Massachusetts, Paris and Harlem. People will be gathering at the bench in Nyack Memorial Park tonight at 5:30 to read from her work. Morrison was the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, she also won a Pulitzer and in 2012, president Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor for an American civilian. Morrison was 88 years old.