Chloe Anthony Wofford was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931, the second of four children. Her parents, who were part of the working-class, moved their family to the North, where there were better opportunities, so that Chloe and her siblings could live a life free of the racial prejudices that living in the South promised. When she was a child, between her father, a proud hard-working man, and her mother, a working, church-going, member of the choir, Chloe would always hear both folktale and song of their Southern Black heritage.
She spent her childhood in the Midwest where Europeans, Whites, Blacks, and Mexicans lived amongst each other in the neighborhoods of Lorain. She attended a desegregated school and at an early age displayed an interest in reading and writing. In school, she was the only black student in her class, and she was also the only one who could read, regardless of color. Chloe was an excellent student who enjoyed reading works from many different writers, her early favorites being the Russian authors Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, French writer Gustave Flaubert, and English novelist Jane Austen. One of her greatest influences, though, is the American writer William Faulkner.
When Chloe was 18, after graduating the Lorain school system with honors, she began to study humanities at America's most distinguished Black college, Howard University, and also at Cornell University, earning degrees at both Universities. While studying in Washington, D.C. at Howard, she changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni", a shortened version of her middle name, seeing as many people found Chloe too hard to pronounce. .
After finishing her studies, she went on to become an introductory English teacher at Texas Southern and then worked faculty at Howard University. In 1964, she moved to Syracuse, NY where she met her husband and birthed two sons. She worked as a textbook editor and then became senior editor for Random House.