A native Southerner, Zora Neale Hurston was born a quarter century after the South's surrender at the close of the Civil War. She came into the world five years before Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 landmark Supreme Court case that confirmed separate but equal was constitutionally legal. This decision by the high court would not be struck down until the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which was to mandate integration of public schools in the South based on the determination that separate was not equal. The South was already a Jim Crow world when Hurston was born, but because her family moved to the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida in its early days, Hurston had the advantage of living where she saw black people in positions of control and leadership—in the town government, in the town store, in churches and schools. Many people owned their own homes, free of white landlords.

Because of her good timing, Hurston found herself in New York's Harlem during the heyday of the explosion of black arts, traveling to the West Indies and throughout the South on fellowships and white patron money, and finally mostly back in Florida for the last thirty years of her life. The end of her life, particularly the last decade, is without doubt the most frustrating time of her life, yet in many ways typical of what African Americans endured before the tide began turning with the advent of the modern Civil Rights movement.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

A section of New York City in upper Manhattan that became predominantly African American around the time of World War I, Harlem also became a gathering place for those interested in the arts. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League used their journals—Crisis and Opportunity, respectively—to showcase the creative work of unknown young writers. Respected and articulate voices, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and a core of other officers within these organizations, including James Weldon Johnson, Charles Johnson (editor of Opportunity), Jessie Fauset (literary editor of Crisis), Alain Locke, and Walter White, solicited their friends at historically black colleges and universities to encourage their most talented students to submit work to the publications of the new civil rights organizations. Opportunity and Crisis held contests for new talent, and readers across the country saw that the burst of poetry and short fiction were the work of young people—for example, Langston Hughes was just over twenty when he had his first poem published in Crisis, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Hughes would emerge as the most popular poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and along with Claude McKay, be considered its best.

David Levering Lewis in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader divides the Black Arts Movement into three distinct stages: the first ended with the 1923 publication of Jean Toomer's prose poem Cane, which was influenced by white artists. The second phase, from early 1924 to mid-1926, was the period of the greatest influence from civil rights publications. Lewis credits the gathering hosted by Charles Johnson of Opportunity on 21 March 1924 at Manhattan's Civic Club—which was attended by over a hundred famous and soon-to-be famous artists and writers—as the event that “shifted [the Renaissance] into high gear.” The third phase Lewis places from sometime in 1926 until the Harlem riot in March 1935. The black artists dominated this last phase—often called the “Niggerati,” a word that Hurston coined for the elite and the dominant voices of the mostly male black writers.¹

When Alain Locke published his anthology The New Negro in 1925, Hurston's early short fiction was included. Many scholars believe this collection was essential to calling attention to what history now sees as a movement. Nella Larson's 1929 Passing—the short novel of a black woman who chooses to pass as a white woman and then discovers how much she misses the company of Negroes—places her character's dilemma in the midst of the glory days of the Renaissance. Her characters are socialites, professional people who party with wealthy white supporters in Harlem for Negro causes. Claude McKay's early 1922 Harlem Shadows drew attention as the first book to appear after the fine work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had died in 1906.

Other names associated with the Harlem Renaissance include the following: Gwendolyn Bennett, artist and assistant editor of Opportunity; Arna Bontemps, writer and historian of the movement in his work entitled The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972); and Sterling Brown, Harvard-educated, Howard University-employed scholar, teacher, and folklorist. Brown also served as literary editor of Opportunity in the 1930s. Countee Cullen, a poet who was married for a short while to the daughter or W. E. B. Du Bois, was one of the earliest African-American recipients of a Guggenheim. Most of the literary lights of the Harlem Renaissance were African Americans; some were called “voluntary Negroes,” such as Walter White, who would mingle in the midst of Klan gatherings in order to obtain information of planned violence against African Americans.² Hurston, at the center of Harlem life during the mid-1920s, knew them all.

The NAACP had its beginnings in 1909, and began to publish Crisis in 1910 under the editorship of Du Bois. Their early work consisted of pushing for legislation in support of anti-lynching. During the 1920s, while still politically active, Du Bois became convinced that the leading intellectual Negroes, often referred to as the “talented tenth,” needed to rally behind their best and brightest writers and artists. The National Urban League had its beginnings in 1910 for the purpose of working to end racial discrimination. The publications of the National Urban League and NAACP were essential to the blossoming of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Between the years 1925 and 1929, stock market activity caused many people to buy heavily in the hopes of making a big profit. On 24 October 1929, a day that would become known as Black Thursday, stock values took a major plunge, followed by a steady day or two, another drop on Monday, and then on Tuesday, 29 October, investors panicked and starting selling all they had. Thousands of people lost huge sums of money, including banks and businesses, which had also invested. For the next three years, stock values continued to decline. Many white benefactors, who had been generous with their support of the Black Arts Movement in New York, could no longer afford to do so.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he called Congress into a special session, a time now referred to as the Hundred Days. The business of the legislators was to pass the laws that would become known as the New Deal—with three immediate ends in mind: provide relief for individuals in need, provide jobs and encourage businesses to aid nationwide recovery, and pass laws to reform businesses so that such a depression would never happen again. Of the many alphabet agencies that came into existence within the early years of Roosevelt's first term in the White House, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 provided jobs in the building of highways, parks, and other work for the jobless, employing about two million people between 1935 and 1941. Hurston worked for the WPA in the creative literary unit of the Florida Federal Writers' Project (FWP). While on the government payroll, she was able to take time away to work on the manuscript of Moses, Man of the Mountain, while still being responsible for her 1,500-word weekly assignments from the FWP, and in August 1939, when she left the FWP, “like so many other federal writers, [she] rarely ever referred to it again.”³

The New Deal helped relieve the depression and renewed the American public's confidence in the government. Many people found that with the government's financial support they were able to live better in the 1930s than they had in the 1920s, and this decade of Depression was Hurston's most prolific of her life. During the years of the Depression, most necessities cost less than they had before the stock market crashed. However, it took America's entry into World War II to end the Depression and put people back to work, this time in the production of war materials.

WORLD WAR II

The war was in full throttle on 8 December 1941 when Roosevelt, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, signed a declaration of war with the imperial government of Japan. Only a few days later, after Axis powers Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, Roosevelt signed another declaration that cast America's lot with that of the Allies. As the United States continued its recovery from the Great Depression, those without jobs found opportunity abounded in the production of goods for the war effort as the President called upon the people to be “the great arsenal of democracy” in preparing supplies for the Allies through sale, loan, or lease.

In 1941, during the start of the country's war years, Hurston was living in California, writing for Paramount Pictures and working on her autobiography, which included her position on American imperialism—a topic she removed from her manuscript after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. By 1942 she was back in Florida, living in St. Augustine, teaching part-time, and collecting information about the Seminole Indians. The next year, she purchased the first of her houseboats, the only type of residence she would ever own as an adult. She was active in the Florida Recreation in War program, which provided talks and other forms of entertainment to segregated audiences of soldiers. By the end of the war, Hurston was making plans to go to Honduras for fieldwork, in the midst of being rejected by Lippincott, the publisher of her first six books. The subject of this novel titled Mrs. Doctor was upper-class blacks.⁴

Hurston published an essay, “Crazy for This Democracy,” in the December 1945 issue of Negro Digest, in which she mocked the call of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and his reference to the United States as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” She suggests that perhaps she had mistaken what she heard and that, after all, maybe he had called for the country being the “Ass-And-All of Democracy,” because “our weapons, money, and the blood of millions of our men have been used to carry the English, French and Dutch and lead them back on the millions of unwilling Asiatics. The Ass-and-all-he-has has been very useful.” She is concerned that there has been no talk whatsoever of concern for the freedom of the Africans, that “no one of darker skin can ever be considered an equal,” and that there must be a repeal of all Jim Crow laws everywhere.⁵ Hurston was obviously aware of African American soldiers who had put their lives on the line for a country that welcomed them back to second-class citizenship upon their return.

THE COLD WAR AND MCCARTHYISM/UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

Shortly after the war was over and the Allies had agreed to help rebuild Germany, Russia cut off contact with the West, and Churchill declared in 1946 that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across the continent. The expression stuck, and for the next several decades, the press and the people of the West worried and wondered about the growing rise of communism behind the Iron Curtain. A policy of containment gathered support in the United States Congress, and what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine offered aid to any free country that needed help in resisting a communist takeover.

In the late 1940s Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, began attracting widespread attention across the country by accusing people of protecting or being communists. Meanwhile in the other arm of the legislature, the House Un-American Activities Committee was also at work searching for communists. Around this time, in fall 1948, just at the time Seraph on the Suwanee was available in bookstores, Hurston was falsely accused by a juvenile of improper advances. Clearly the mood in the country had been cultivated to flash big headlines now and worry about the truth later. Hurston's arrest and the morals charge made the headlines of the Baltimore Afro-American. Hurston, who had been out of the country at the time of the alleged charges, felt the sting of betrayal. Though cleared of the charges, her despair led to depression. Though communism was not the issue for Hurston, the quickness with which reporters were jumping onto people named in the Red Scare frenzy primed them to go after Hurston. Yellow journalism, around for half a century by this time, made for brisk newspaper sales. Hurston could identify with victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee and, later, McCarthyism.

KOREAN CONFLICT

The newly created United Nations (UN), which came into existence at the close of World War II, was soon put to a challenge by trouble in Korea. Hostility mounted when troops from the Communist-ruled land north of the thirty-eighth parallel, a latitudinal line that separates North from South Korea, invaded the South. The United Nations moved promptly to call the act of aggression a violation of international peace. Under the leadership of Harry Truman, with support from Congress but without a formal declaration of war, the United States sent to the region by far the most military personnel of any UN member country. War in Korea raged for the first three years (1950-53) of the new decade; at its peak, the United States supplied about a half million troops.

These war years were tough ones for Hurston, who found some easy pleasure living in Eau Gallie in the same house in which she had written Mules and Men during the early 1930s, but who was having a great deal of difficulty getting her work published. At the start of the decade, she was working as a maid in Miami when her article “Conscience of the Court” was published in the Saturday Evening Post, and the white woman who had hired her notified the Miami Herald, who gave headlines to Hurston's plight. Still, she kept writing—about her animals, a rejected novel on the first African-American woman millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker, an inventor of hair care products for black women. Hurston published an article on why the Negro would not buy into communism, and she worked on the 1950 Senate campaign of conservative George Smathers, who would be the winner, against the long-time, popular liberal, ardent New Dealer, friend-of-Roosevelt Claude Pepper, who had, only a dozen years earlier, represented the thinking of the “new” South. She also published an essay in the Saturday Evening Post supporting Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, who had been a vocal spokesman against Roosevelt's proposals for domestic spending. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1940, 1948, and 1952. When the soldiers return home from war, and the modern Civil Rights movement is just around the corner, Hurston's politics take a more conservative bent.

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Three events are said to mark the advent of the modern Civil Rights movement: the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education on 17 May 1954; the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955; and the December 1955 start of the Montgomery bus boycott launched in support of Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat in the white section of the bus and her subsequent arrest. In the early days, these three events, along with the integration by nine black students of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, attracted the most attention, the most press coverage, and the clearest indication to the South and to the world that things were changing, momentum was building, and the South as it had been would never again be the same.

Oliver Brown, on behalf of his daughter, sued the Topeka Board of Education for not allowing her to attend the all-white school near her home. This case was bundled with similar ones from Virginia and South Carolina, which challenged the underlining tenet of Plessy v. Ferguson, which for fifty years had given credibility to separate but equal as the law of the land. Thurgood Marshall, who would be named the first black justice to serve on the Supreme Court, represented the cases with a compelling argument that separate was not equal, using the schools as his most convincing example. The court ruled unanimously that segregation reinforced for blacks a sense of inferiority. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for the court claiming that segregation by law violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for equal protection under the law. Warren was an outspoken liberal and the target of a campaign for impeachment by the John Birch Society. Begun in 1958 for the alleged purpose of fighting the communists, this group peppered the South with billboards, and followers painted the message on the roofs and sides of deserted barns and buildings that were visible from secondary roads: “Impeach Earl Warren.” Those who supported segregation in the South—both whites and blacks—were often thought to be communists themselves or communist-sympathizers. The law, however, did not mean quick compliance. Many southern schools moved slowly, maintaining their segregated status quo, for the next several decades. Into the 1970s, schools were still “working on” their plans. High school proms, long after schools had been integrated, remained segregated well into the 1990s. Jim Crow laws suffered a lingering death.

Over a year passed before Hurston responded in print to the school desegregation effort. On 11 August 1955 the Orlando Sentinel published Hurston's “Court Order Can't Make Races Mix.” On her part, it is a letter to the editor of the paper, breaking her promise to God and others that she would not speak on the issue. She feels, however, that enough time has passed and people keep missing the big point of interest for her—that the forced integration is insulting and an offense to the “self-respect of [her] people.” Hurston does not want to be where she is not wanted: “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” Further, she feels that the court order suggests that black schools are not as good as white schools in terms of intellectual rigor, that there is something inherently inferior about the capabilities of black teachers. How is it possible, she wonders, to “scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association”? Hurston does not depart from her life-long stance on her race—it has never made her sad, angry, disappointed, or any number of other feelings that would indicate despair over being born Negro. She is who she is—with no sympathy for the “tragedy of color” school.⁶

While Hurston, in this piece, makes a strong statement in support of race pride, she herself is the end product of an all-white (save her) alma mater, Barnard College in New York City. She departed from Howard University, the academically strongest, historically black institution of higher learning in the country, to experience Harlem at its most exciting coming-of-age-in-the-arts period. Hurston was invited to Barnard, though; she did not assert herself on a place that did not want her. Hurston, however, seems oblivious in this letter to the knowledge that if the African Americans of Florida and the rest of the South should wait until they are invited to attend schools with more money, more supplies, and more course offerings, they would have to wait a long, long time. Her letter aroused enormous interest, and she was bombarded with requests to reprint the essay in other Southern newspapers and newsletters. However, much of the interest was from those who saw her position as simply anti-segregation. Here was a prominent Negro writer who was advocating the status quo. Naturally, advocates for civil rights—both white and black—were disheartened by her position.

Within seven months of this public stand, she was evicted from the property she had been living on for five years in Eau Gallie, a place she thought of as near-perfect tranquility and into which she had poured countless hours of improvement through her gardening efforts, with a commitment from the landlord that she could one day buy the property. With an interim move to a trailer in the area, she accepted the offer of writing for the black newspaper in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she spent the last three years of her life. Most of the white publishing doors were now closed to her, and she would be dead before she would ever see the outcome of the civil rights legislation that was just beginning its life as she was drawing near to the end of hers.

Notes

1. David Levering Lewis, “Introduction,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. xv-xvi.

2. Lewis, p. 765.

3. Pamela Bordelon, “Foreword,” in Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project: Go Gator and Muddy the Water (New York: Norton, 1999), p. xi.

4. Cheryl A. Wall, “Chronology,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 973-5.

5. Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, pp. 945-9.

6. Zora Neale Hurston, “Court Order Can't Make Races Mix,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, pp. 956-8.