In later decades Bambara devoted her attentions to independent filmmaking and encouraging others, especially women, to use video as a medium for their storytelling.
Born Miltona Mirkin Cade to Helen Brent Henderson Cade and Walter Cade II, Bambara and her brother, Walter, grew up with their mother in New York City (Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Queens) and Jersey City. In what Bambara later described as the "old plantation tradition," her father named her after his employer, but while she was in kindergarten, the young Miltona announced to her mother that henceforward she would be known as Toni. She adopted Bambara in 1970 while searching for a name for her unborn child and remembered that "the minute I said it I immediately inhabited it, felt very at home in the world." When speaking of specific biographical details of her life, Bambara often chose to give enlarged impressions of a few individuals and events from her early life that she felt most influenced her. In September 1973 Bambara published an essay in Redbook explaining what she most appreciated about her mother, Helen. Typical of her tendency to enlarge upon reality as a means of emphasizing an important point, Bambara began the essay with an anecdote narrated, in a distinctly African American dialect, by a young girl who remembers the many occasions on which her mother visited her public-school classroom to set the teacher straight on a few facts about African American history and people.
This is a free page. This page contains 191 words. This
biography contains 6,789 words (approx. 23 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Toni Cade Bambara Access Pass.
