Bambara is one of the few who continued to work within the black urban communities (filming, lecturing, organizing, and reading from her works at rallies and conferences), producing imaginative reenactments of these experiences in her fiction. In addition, Bambara established herself over the years as an educator, teaching in colleges and in independent community schools in various cities on the East Coast.
Toni Cade was born in New York City to Helen Brent Henderson Cade, who also had one son, Walter Cade. Toni and her brother grew up with their mother in New York City (Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Queens) and Jersey City, New Jersey. She attended various public and private schools in New York State, New Jersey, and the Southern United States. She adopted the name Bambara in 1970 when she discovered it as a part of a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great-grandmother's trunk. Reticent in most of her essays and interviews about specific biographical details of her life, Bambara chooses instead to give enlarged impressions of a few individuals and events from her early life which she feels most influenced her.
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