The Lesson Study Guide

Toni Cade Bambara, originally named Miltona Mirkin Cade, was born in Harlem in New York City in 1939. She grew up in Harlem, Queens, and Brooklyn. As a child she changed her name to Toni, and later, in 1970, she added “Bambara” to her surname, referencing a West African ethnic group of the same name. Bambara studied theater and English at Queens College, earning her BA in 1959. That same year, she published her first short story, “Sweet Town,” which would later be included in her most well-known short story collection, Gorilla, My Love (1972). During the latter half of the 1960s, Bambara worked with City College of New York’s SEEK program which assists economically disadvantaged young people, particularly people of color, with attending and succeeding at college. In 1970 and 1971, Bambara compiled, edited, and published two collections of poetry, short fiction, and essays by a number of famous Black authors. She titled the collections The Black Woman (1970) and Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971). Gorilla, My Love was published in 1972 and was edited by Toni Morrison, a contemporary of Bambara. Later in life, Bambara wrote and produced numerous screenplays, including The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), which depicted the 1985 Philadelphia police assault on the headquarters of the Black revolutionary community organization MOVE. Throughout her life, Bambara was politically active, and she visited the communist countries Cuba and Vietnam in an effort to learn about the lives of women who lived there. Bambara died of colon cancer in 1995.

Toni Cade Bambara was active in the Black Arts movement, a literary and cultural movement which began alongside the growing civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. The goal of the movement was to promote Black pride as well as new cultural institutions that would resist white Western artistic traditions. In “The Lesson,” this movement can particularly be seen in the character of Miss Moore, who wears her hair naturally and attempts to instill an understanding of racial and economic cultural issues in the children who live in her neighborhood. Additionally, Bambara’s work incorporates African American Vernacular English, also known as AAVE, in an effort to demonstrate that this dialect spoken by many Black Americans was worthy of a role in serious literature. While “The Lesson” doesn’t mention the civil rights movement happening in the 1960s (when the story is likely set), it is, in a sense, about raising race and class consciousness, as Sylvia begins to understand systems of inequality in New York City and throughout the United States.

Many of Bambara’s short stories, including “The Lesson,” depict young Black girls living in New York City during the civil rights movement. “Raymond’s Run” and “Gorilla, My Love,” are two examples. One of Bambara’s most notable literary contemporaries is Toni Morrison, whose novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) both center on young women navigating race and class issues, albeit in earlier time periods. Bambara edited and published two collections of Black literature: the first was The Black Woman (1970), which centers on Black women writers and contains work by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker among others. The second was Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971), which contains work by Langston Hughes, as well as some of Bambara’s students from the SEEK program. Additionally, Bambara, like many members of the Black Arts Movement, drew on the Black literary tradition begun by writers during the Harlem Renaissance, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen.