Zora Neale Hurston: Was Segregation the Better Path?

By Veronica Mackey

Throughout the history of Black people in America, much of the focus has been on securing the same rights and benefits as Whites.  During the early 20^th Century, the push was for social and economic equality. The plight of Black people as poor, mistreated and disrespected was often written about by elite Black writers of the day, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois.  

But there was one who defied the so-called “race propaganda”—a Black woman with Southern roots named Zora Neale Hurston.   The writer and anthropologist lived and breathed Black life, studying Black people and writing about their inherent greatness.  A woman of “mixed race,” Hurston wasn’t willing to concede to the self-hating and misogynistic thinking of her day.  She was neither loyal to white liberalism, nor one to wear the pain and suffering of Black life on her sleeve.  She saw her people as capable, worthy and self-sufficient.

Honestly, there was notoriety and financial gain in illuminating the harshness of Black life and eliciting subsequent White guilt.  Black leaders, therefore, pushed integration as the best path to a better life.

Timothy Sandefur wrote in article for the Goldwater Institute: “She (Hurst) despised segregation, but thought that black Americans would be better off pursuing happiness on their own terms rather than devoting all their energies to politics. Worse, she was repelled by those who attacked the idea of self-reliance and portrayed black Americans as helpless victims. She despised the violent and bitter novels of Richard Wright, for example, and loathed the tendency of white liberals to act as though blacks needed their pity. She preferred to focus her energies, as she put it, to “singing a song to the morning.”

In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, she wrote:

“Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole… I learned that skins were no measure of what was inside people. So none of the Race cliches meant anything any more. I began to laugh at both white and black who claimed special blessings on the basis of race…. I am a mixed-blood, it is true, but I differ from the party line in that I neither consider it an honor nor a shame.”

Hurston’s love for Black people grew out of her anthropological studies.  Realizing that no human was inherently better than another, she proved this theory through studying human behavior.  In 1936 she won a Guggenheim fellowship to study voodoo and magic in Jamaica and Haiti.  Her research was the impetus of her best-selling book, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” published in 1937.

Today, Hurston is one of America’s best-selling authors, although she died in obscurity.  Having been blackballed by some in the literary field for her views on race, she spent the last 10 years of her life working as a maid and doing odd jobs to support meager earnings from her writing.  She died of a heart attack in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.  

Alice Walker, the prolific Black author of “The Color Purple” considered Hurston a primary influence.  In fact,  she provided a headstone for the late writer and wrote an article about it titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine in 1975.

The revived interest in Hurston resulted in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” becoming a TV film in 2005.  The main character, Janie Crawford, is a Southern Black woman in search for self-love and self-respect who eventually finds freedom over racial history, domestic violence, and sexual norms.  The film was produced by Oprah Winfrey, and starred Halle Berry and Michael Ealy.