Winfrey, Coates among speakers at tribute to Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison celebrated as a pathfinder, an inspiration and a guardian at tribute where speakers included Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Oprah Winfrey, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Angela Davis have spoken at a tribute to the late Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate who died last summer.

Friends, family, peers and admirers on Thursday filled Manhattan’s historic Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a setting suitably grand and reverent for the author of “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.”

Morrison was celebrated as a pathfinder and companion, an inspiration and a guardian.

Winfrey remembered her as the most challenging of novelists, one for whom a dingle reading was never enough.

Coates spoke with awe as he remembered reading her as a young man, then continuing into middle age, calling her an exemplar of mature storytelling and a reminder that, as he put it, “black is beautiful, but it ain’t always pretty.”