Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God which was adapted for a 2005 film of the same title by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, starring Halle Berry with a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida located six miles north of Orlando. It was one of the first all-Black towns to be formed after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and, on August 15, 1887, was the first such town to be incorporated. Hurston's parents were Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher. Her father was also a three-term mayor who helped establish the laws of the town. In 1904, her mother died and her father sent her to a private school in Jacksonville, Florida. She graduated from Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College, (Morgan State University), formerly Centenary Biblical Institute, a historically black college. She did undergraduate studies at another HBCU school, Howard University. While at Howard, Hurston became one of the earliest members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop, the University's student newspaper. Hurston left Howard in 1924, unable to support herself. Hurston was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927. While at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic (Ethnography is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of character and number descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork).

In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard, she became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the literary magazine Fire!! along with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent and Gwendolyn Bennett. (Fire!! is a Black literary magazine published in 1926. This literary movement became the center of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston applied her ethnographic training to document Black folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men (1935) along with fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern up bring, with one performance on Broadway. Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and conduct research on Haitian spiritual magic in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the voodoo trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the rich Black wife of a local racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie. Hurston spent her last 10 years as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher in Fort Pierce, where she died of a stroke. The publication of Alice Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine revived interest in her work and helped spark a Hurston renaissance. Hurston's house in Fort Pierce is a National Historic Landmark. Fort Pierce celebrates Hurston annually through various events such as Hattitudes, birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April, Zora Fest. Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.

During her prime, Hurston was a bootstrap Republican and fan of Booker T. Washington's self-help politics. She was opposed to the visions (including communism) professed by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston thus became the leading Black figure on the conservative Old Right, and in 1952 she actively promoted the presidential candidacy of Robert Taft, who was, like Hurston, opposed to forced integration. She opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt the physical closeness of Blacks to Whites was not going to be the salvation her people hoped for, as she herself had had many experiences to the contrary. In addition, she worried about the demise of Black schools and Black teachers as a way to pass on cultural tradition to future generations of Black Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix, which was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955.

Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of reasons, both cultural and political. Many readers objected to the representation of Southern Black dialect in Hurston's novels. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. Some critics during her time felt that Hurston's decision to render language in this way caricatured black culture. In more recent times, however, critics have praised Hurston for her artful capture of the actual spoken idiom of the day.

With the publication of the ambitious novel Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, Hurston burst through the tight bounds of contemporary Black writing in another way. This is a tale of poor Whites struggling in rural Florida's citrus industry. Black characters recede to the background. Neither the Black intelligentsia nor the White mainstream of the late 1940s could accept the notion of a Black writer speaking through White characters. Seraph ended up being Hurston's last major literary effort as she retreated to small-town Florida for the rest of her life. The text stands out, as she remarked herself, as a testimony to her own self-definition as a regional as much as a Black writer. The re-discovery of Hurston's work coincided with the popularity and critical acclaim of authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Walker herself, whose works are centered on Black experiences which include, but do not necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.