Zora Neale Hurston’s place in the pantheon of Florida’s humanities icons is a given. But it wasn’t always this way.
50 years ago, Hurston’s work and legacy were generally forgotten, and her grave in Fort Pierce, Florida, remained unmarked. Her collected materials of manuscripts, letters, and other written items had been placed in a burn barrel after she died in 1960 and were only saved by the quick work of a Black St. Lucie County Sheriff’s deputy. Those manuscripts, now lovingly restored and still showing the burn marks and water damage from that incident, are today the basis of the “Hurston Papers” located in the Special Collections of the University of Florida’s library. They are the basis of the remarkable resurgence of interest in this enigmatic author, folklorist, anthropologist, and ethnographer, and flamboyant Bohemian.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, in the heart of that state’s Black Belt. The daughter of a preacher and a schoolteacher, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was three. Eatonville, an all-Black community in central Florida near Orlando, where her father became the mayor, provided the basis for much of Hurston’s future literary endeavors and gave her the confidence to make her own way in a white dominated world. She then engaged in a peripatetic academic life, graduating high school in Baltimore in 1917, attending Howard University in Washington D.C., and ending up at Barnard College in New York City, where she was the only Black student in that all-female college. She received her B.A. from Barnard in 1928 and, while there, worked with some of the most influential American anthropologists of the time—Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and especially Franz Boas. She even began graduate studies in Anthropology with Boas, studying Black life in the American South, collecting materials on Black folklore, music, and religion. While in New York, she worked with playwright Annie Meyer on her play Black Souls, among the first plays written by a white author about miscegenation and lynching in the South (interestingly enough, James Weldon Johnson, another inaugural member of the Florida Humanities Hall of Fame, also worked with Meyer on the play).
Traveling through the South and living in Harlem provided Hurston with rather divergent views of Black life in America. She viewed the South as a place where Blacks retained their culture and religion, while in places like Harlem, they embraced a new modern urban culture. Associated with many authors and artists in the Harlem Renaissance, she clashed with them over both their dismissal of female writers and their categorization of Black Southern traditions as primitive and uncivilized. Returning to Florida, she used field work and oral history in Eatonville and Polk County to write Mules and Men (published in 1935), a semi-autobiographical ethnography history of Black folk tales, considered today as a superb example of the genre. Two years later, she published Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel set in central and south Florida which culminates with a vivid description of the devastation caused by the great 1928 Palm Beach hurricane. In 2005, Time magazine picked it as one of the 100 best English language novels of the past 100 years. Hurston continued her work in Florida into the late 1930s, working with the Federal Writers Project, interviewing Black turpentine workers and recording their stories and music.
Because of her wide-ranging interests and her rather irascible personality, Hurston drifted from job to job throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Growing more politically conservative during this period, she penned articles for the mainstream Saturday Evening Post, endorsed anti-New Dealer Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, and opposed the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that struck down school segregation. Leaning on her experience growing up in Eatonville, she reasoned that Blacks did not need white support to succeed. In 1952, she worked as a freelance reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, an important national Black newspaper, on the explosive murder trial of Ruby McCollum in Live Oak, Florida. The case centered on the murder of a prominent white physician by a Black woman and Hurston’s writing revealed the taut relationship between race, sex, and power in rural Jim Crow Florida. Hurston grew increasingly destitute throughout the 1950s, ending up in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, where she died in early 1960.
Forgotten for almost 50 years, Hurston’s work is now considered essential for an understanding of modern Florida. Her pathbreaking use of oral history and her perception that all people, rich or poor, Black or white, male or female, can add to our knowledge of humanity makes her an appropriate honoree for the Florida Humanities Hall of Fame. Honored with a commemorative postage stamp in 2003, Hurston’s work reminds us that stories are what make us human.
