November 20, 1996 - Toni Morrison, the first African American to win the Nobel Prize, speaks at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s NOVELLO Festival.

• "You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” --From a talk given at the New York Public Library in 1986. 
• A sharecropper's daughter, this Pulitzer Prize author is also the first African American to win the Nobel Prize.