By Gail Waterhouse, News Staff

On Friday afternoon, world-renowned author Toni Morrison spoke to a sold-out crowd at Blackman Auditorium, offering insight on her writing process and reading a passages from her latest book.

Though Northeastern has gained a reputation for bringing stellar guests to campus, Morrison, winner of both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, stood out. She attracted a crowd of all ages, including students from Northeastern, local high schools and other colleges.

Her appearance was part of the event, “No Welcome Home: Remembering Harms and Restoring Justice,” presented by the Northeastern School of Law and the Humanities Center. The event was intended to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The law school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJP), an effort led by Professor Margaret Burnham, works on cold cases of race-based murders from the 1930s to 1960s. Students have the ability to build a case from the ground up, Burnham said, and victims’ families and their communities get the closure they may feel they have been denied. The project currently has a docket of more than 100 unsolved cases.

Before Morrison spoke, a short film highlighted three cases the CRRJP has worked on, including that of Malcom Wright, who in 1949 was beaten and killed in Mississippi in front of his wife and children.

“This evening is for them,” Burnham said. Many family members of the victims were seated in the audience.

As the 81-year-old Morrison took the stage to a standing ovation, she spoke of the importance of the CRRJP’s work, noting that violence against African-American and Native-American people in the United States has been so extensive that it’s “almost casual” in the way tales of brutality are relayed.

“Every family has a story of degradation,” she said, noting that the history of injustice against these groups is “long and bloody.”

After brief remarks on the importance of sustaining the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other social justice groups like the CRRJP, Morrison then read passages from her latest book, “Home,” which was published last May. She described the book as being about manhood, written through the lens of one man’s life experience.

Speaking softly and deliberately, Morrison’s lyrical prose flowed easily. The protagonist’s sister was born, she read, and named nine days later, “lest death notice fresh life and eat it.” Morrison’s reading allowed such nuanced phrases to land definitively among the audience, leading the crowd to break its silence in a murmur of admiration.

Such attention to cultural details is a strength of Morrison’s, and in between passages she offered the audience some insights into her writing process.

It was common in the 1920s, she noted, for black towns in the South to disappear completely — to be populated one year and empty the next. Morrison set the protagonist’s childhood in such a town, referring to census records to choose exactly the one in which she would set the story.

Morrison revealed more about her writing style in the question and answer session that followed. She discussed the extensive research she does for each book, once going so far as to contact the Library of Congress to obtain a copy of the “Green Book,” a Jim Crow era travel guide that outlined places safe for African Americans to travel. She wanted the book so she could reference authentic 1950s advertisements.

She also touched on the extensive thought she puts into the words that comprise the books themselves.

“You have to create language that is not off-putting to the reader,” she said.

In response to a question about how beginner writers can get their story out into the world, Morrison revealed that for her, writing is about creating something that doesn’t exist.

“I think the compulsion for beginning writers, or any writer, is knowing that there’s something not there, language, or a character, and you have to fill it. You’re the only one who can,” she said. “I wrote the first book I wrote because it wasn’t there and I wanted to read it.”

Morrison went on to discuss how reading isn’t supposed to be easy, like many people expect, and related a conversation she once had with Oprah Winfrey, when the television tycoon asked why sometimes she would have to go back and read previous pages to understand what was happening in a book.

“‘That’s called reading,’” Morrison said she replied, garnering laughs from the audience.

One audience member asked about the author’s thoughts on evil and goodness in the world, topics Morrison has discussed at Harvard Divinity School.

“Evil and violence take the stage – all of it,” she said, adding that goodness tends to remain backstage and out of the limelight. “It whispers.”

As she wrapped up her thoughts on the subject, she posed a question that seemed to evoke the mission of both Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work and the efforts of the CRRJP.

“When does it become more important to take care of somebody else instead of you?” she asked. “That’s why this project is so important. People lose the power and real excitement of morality.”