Zora Neal Hurston – Claiming Space, PBS American Experience
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, 62 miles from here in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.
She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker
Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.
Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All of her four grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper,
When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there.
Her mother died in 1904, and her father remarried the following year. She and her siblings were sent to a Baptist boarding school. After a year, her father stopped paying her tuition. She left school at 14 years old to fend for herself. She had three short marriages and no children.
In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority. She anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City.
In 1934, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.
Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research
In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative.
From October 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras. Hurston expressed interest in the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, people who were of partial African ancestry and had developed creole cultures).
During her last decade, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to go to Live Oak, Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. McCollum was charged with murdering the white Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who was also a politician. McCollum said he had forced her to have sex and bear his children. McCollum was convicted to death, and later committed to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee.
Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons. The use of African-American dialect, as featured in Hurston's novels, became less popular. Younger writers felt that it was demeaning to use such dialect, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature.
Since the late 20th century, there has been a revival of interest in Hurston.[32] Critics have since praised her skillful use of idiomatic speech.[59]
Hurston, who was a Republican, argued that New Deal economic support had created a harmful dependency by African Americans on the government and that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians. She was also a supporter of Booker T. Washington, while criticizing WEB DuBois as an elitist.
Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so), educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. Also, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on the cultural tradition to future generations of African Americans.
She moved to Fort Pierce, Florida. Penniless, she was moved into a Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke. She died on January 28, 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave until 1973. Novelist Alice Walker found her unmarked grave. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960."
After Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity.
In a 1957 letter, which could have been her epitaph she wrote:
But ... I have made phenomenal growth as a creative artist. ... I am not materialistic ... If I do happen to die without money, somebody will bury me, though I do not wish it to be that way.
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