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Zora Neale Hurston:
Fighting Jim Crow through the All-Black Community
By Virginia Brackett, Ph.D Overview Denied their rights in white-run society, African Americans created their own institutions -- churches, schools, businesses
and clubs--to create for themselves the things that white society tried to deny them: education, work and hope for the future. This lesson is best used with The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, Program Two:
Fighting Back (1896-1917)
due to Hurston's all-black settings in many of her works. Her short stories, "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits," both exemplify the statement that "African Americans created their own institutions ... to create for themselves the things white society tried to deny them." Teachers may introduce Hurston's biography with the above quotation. Because she did believe in segregation, claiming that blacks did not need whites to gain education or to succeed, she offers an excellent contrast to writers such as Ralph Ellison and others who used their fiction to make overt political statements against the separate but equal philosophy. This lesson designed for middle and high school students offers a variety of paths for students to demonstrate their new-found knowledge on Hurston and the times in which she lived.
Curriculum Standards The following standards have been taken from the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning ( McRel) standards. Students will work in groups to:
- Understand the importance of equality of opportunity and equal protection of the law as a characteristic of American society.
- Understand the important factors that have helped shape American society.
- Know ways in which Americans have attempted to make the values and principles of the U.S. Constitution a reality.
- Understand the significance of fundamental values and principles for the individual and society.
- Know the historical and contemporary efforts put forth to reduce discrepancies between ideals and the reality of American public life.
- Know how various individual, social, and political actions have helped to reduce discrepancies between reality and the ideals of American constitutional democracy.
- Know different types of primary and secondary sources and the motives, interests, and biases they express.
- Analyze the values held by specific people who influence history and the role their values played in influencing history.
- Evaluate the validity and credibility of different historical interpretations.
- Use a variety of resource materials, including various primary sources, to gather information for research topics.
- Use a variety of criteria to evaluate the validity and reliability of primary and secondary source information.
- Synthesize information from multiple research studies to draw conclusions that go beyond those found in any of the individual studies.
- Use criteria to evaluate own and others' effectiveness in group discussions and formal presentations and evaluate the clarity and accuracy of information.
- Understand elements of persuasion and appeal in spoken texts.
- Understand the use of stereotypes and biases in visual media.
- Analyze complex elements of plot in specific literary works.
- Understand how themes are used across literary works and genres.
- Understand the effects of author's style and complex literary devices and techniques on the overall quality of a work.
- Understand the relationships between literature and its historical period, culture, and society.
- Understand inferred and recurring themes in literary works.
- Understand writing techniques used to influence the reader and accomplish an author's purpose.
- Understand the philosophical assumptions and basic beliefs underlying an author's work.
Time Required Preparation time will include reading one or both stories by Hurston (these can be assigned as homework), and a review of laws/customs required by Jim Crow at http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/menu.htm.Debate Forum: If the reading material is used as the basis for a debate, the debate will require one hour of class time for preparation and one hour of class
time for the debate itself. Essay Assignment: If the reading material is used as the basis for an essay, the essay may be written outside of class. One hour of class time will be used for discussion of the essays.
Creative Activity: The creative activity should be planned during an hour of class time. An additional hour of class time may be used for presentation of the activities. Materials Needed
- Biography of Zora Neale Hurston below
- "Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston [
http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/hurston.htm#Sweat]
"Gilded Six-Bits" [
http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/hurston.htm#Gilded%20Six-Bits]
The Lesson Anticipatory Set Quick-Write assignment: Many African-American fiction writers during the Jim Crow era created stories that showed the racism that whites exercised against blacks. Zora
Neale Hurston, however, created fiction that centered on all-black communities. Rarely were white characters even included. How could her approach also serve to fight the attitudes of the Jim Crow era?
Web site visit: Have students view the caricatures of blacks on-line at the Ferris Museum: http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/menu.htm
Discuss how black fiction writers might counteract such stereotypes Point out this is what happened in South after the Civil War. African Americans were granted freedoms which were gradually reduced and eventually
eliminated. This was done in both legal and illegal ways. Procedures Read the biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Review with students the Jim Crow laws. Discuss Hurston's biography with students, emphasizing her childhood in an all-black community in Florida and her later interest as an anthropologist in cultures and
their stories. Ask the following questions, and ask older students to write down their answers:
How might Hurston's upbringing in such a community have affected her? What would be some of the positive aspects of being a black child raised in a segregated community during Jim Crow? What would be some
of the negative aspects of being a black child raised in a segregated community during Jim Crow? Why would some of Hurston's fellow writers and readers be upset that she featured all-black communities?
Assign one or both stories by Hurston for student reading outside of class. Discuss the stories read to determine a basic understanding by students. Focus on:
Characterization: Who are the main characters? Who are the minor characters? What conflicts exist in the story? What are the minor characters' attitudes toward the major characters? Setting: Describe the place
where the story occurs. In "Sweat," be sure students understand that the main character did laundry for whites. Symbols: Discuss biblical references and references to new life.
Plot: Discuss the events in the stories. Identify the climax. Theme: Discuss what the characters learned, and which characters changed.
Once the main discussion is finished, select one or more of the following ideas for an extension/culminating activity. Debate Activity
Charge: Zora Neale Hurston is a traitor to her race.
Reasons:
She does not include material about racism in her stories, so they do not help readers better understand racism. Whites won't even read her stories, because the all-black characters will not interest them.
Assignment: Class divides into two groups. One group defends Hurston against the charge, while the other attempts to prove the charge legitimate. The teacher may say which side "won," explaining why, or she
may leave the debate as a draw, emphasizing the balanced points presented. Then discuss the fact that in present day, Hurston is viewed as a marvel, simply for the amount of writing and publishing that she did and for
her depiction of strong moral black characters. Essay Writing Activity
Sample Assignment: Write a five-paragraph essay in which you try to convince the reader that Hurston's method during Jim Crow was a
good one. In the first paragraph, remember to state your main point clearly. You might write, "Zora Neale Hurston's use of an all-black community in her stories was an excellent way to fight Jim Crow ideas."
In the three paragraphs that follow, support your idea by using examples from Hurston's stories. In your concluding paragraph, remember to summarize your main points. Bring your essay to class and be prepared to share
your thesis statement and the examples that you used to support that idea. Creative Activity
One student will pretend to be a white person visiting an all-black town during the Jim Crow era. The other
students in the group will portray the members of the town. Remind students that in an all-black community, Jim Crow laws would not have been followed. Students should construct a skit in which the visitor reacts to
certain activities witnessed in the all-black community. Portray the visitor as having changed his/her opinion in some way when the visit concludes. Call for discussion on the part of the class at the end of each skit
to check for understanding. Using some of the students' specific actions, ask the "audience" what their thoughts are about those actions. Ask the audience to imagine a not-so-happy interaction. Assessment
Participation points may be awarded in the debate and for the creative activity. Essays may be evaluated for a point grade, based on criteria given to the students.
Hurston, Zora Neale: (1901-1960) A black writer whose courage and talent would inspire the best
African-American writers of the latter 20th century, even though her confrontation of the Jim Crow culture in the United States differed greatly from that of many of her contemporaries. Hurston's birth date has caused a
decades-long dispute; while the author claimed to have been born in Eatonville, Florida, on January 7, 1901, other records show her birthplace as Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891. From the age of three, Hurston
did live in Eatonville, north of Orlando. She later described Eatonville as America's first incorporated all-black
community. It acted as a basis for locales in Hurston's stories and novels, most of which used an all-black community as a setting. Never a proponent of integration, Hurston co-opted in her writings white power for
blacks by creating all-black cultures in which her characters claimed ultimate control over their lives. Hurston's father, John, worked as a carpenter and preacher and served several times as Eatonville's mayor.
Hurston first attended a school founded by students of Booker T. Washington. After her mother, Lucy, died in 1904, John remarried, but Hurston did not get along with her stepmother. She left Florida to tour briefly
with a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe where she served the lead singer as a maid. Hurston then settled in Baltimore where she worked as a waitress and attended night classes at the Morgan Academy.
After graduating from high school in 1917, she worked at various jobs. In 1920, Hurston enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C., as an English major. She began her professional writing career in 1920 by
publishing poetry in Negro World, the newspaper of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In 1922, her first short story appeared in Opportunity
, a literary journal sponsored by the Urban League. That same year, she graduated from Howard with an associate's degree in English. The editor of Opportunity, Charles S.
Johnson, encouraged Hurston's writing, and, when Hurston won a writing contest sponsored by the journal, encouraged her to travel to New York to join the African-American arts community. After meeting such
notables as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen at the awards dinner, Hurston decided to move to New York City. After arriving there, Hurston became part of the New Negro Movement, which evolved into the Harlem
Renaissance. She also became a domestic for Fanny Hurst, one of the founders of Barnard College. Following Hurst's offer to sponsor her, Hurston became Barnard's only black student. She studied with
anthropologist Franz Boas and received a $1,400 research fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. While traveling in the South, she met Langston Hughes in Mobile, Alabama. He
accepted her invitation to travel with her as she traveled back toward New York. Although the two decided to collaborate on a writing project, their play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, which they intended to
counter racial stereotypes, was never produced due to their disagreement over publication and production rights. It would finally be published in 1991.
Hurston's interest in anthropology led her to study various cultures, including those in Haiti and the Bahamas. In 1929, she worked to organize her 95,000 words of stories and material on religions and conjuring.
During that process, she also transcribed a sermon by the Reverend C.C. Lovelace that became part of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). She continued to collect local mythology and folklore from every
place she visited, resulting in her second novel, Mules and Men (1935). Her works contained many autobiographical elements, particularly in the settings of all-black towns. When she returned to Jamaica in
1936 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, she likely contracted parasites and bacteria that contributed to her many intestinal and liver ailments. Arguably Hurston's most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), was not well received by other members of the black artistic and political community. Richard Wright, for one, did not approve of her
"minstrel technique," which included the use of dialect by her characters. She was criticized for not
employing the more popular technique of her contemporary black writers, "social document fiction," which
allowed those authors to criticize segregation and the lack of ethnic identity for African Americans. Robert
Hemenway later analyzed Hurston's method as a "personal transcendence of racial realities" (281). Part of the criticism grew from Hurston's acceptance of help from whites.
Hurston took part in the Negro unit of the Florida Federal Writers' Project, serving as supervisor and publishing her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). She received an honorary Doctor of Letters
from Morgan State College and worked to record songs and stories for the Library of Congress. She also served on the faculty at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham but left that post following a dispute
with the college's president. Additional honors included a 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the best book on race relations, her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). She later contributed to the 1943
collection, "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," printed by Negro Digest. Her account focused on a
medical examination that took place in a closet, rather than in the examining room of a doctor's office. Charles Scribner's Sons Publishers advanced her $1,000 for her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948).
Unable to support herself as an author, Hurston took a job as a domestic in Miami. Suffering from depression, likely contributed to by charges of child molestation, Hurston did not write for several years.
The charges were dismissed in 1949, and, in 1951, she moved to Eau Gallie, Florida, where her beautiful garden became legendary. Hurston again raised the ire of fellow blacks in 1954 when she wrote a letter to the
Orlando Sentinel, blasting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. She found the implication that
blacks could not learn unless placed in white schools demeaning and unfounded. Until she died on January 28, 1960, Hurston worked as a filing clerk, a cook and a domestic. Unrecognized at the time of her death, she
was buried in an unmarked grave. Interest in Hurston revived with the feminist movement. In the 1970s, her work became part of the new canon
of writing by women. Studied and applauded by such notables as Alice Walker, Hurston's writings regained popularity. In 1973, Walker placed a marker on the field where Hurston is buried. It reads: "Zora Neale
Hurston, 'A Genius of the South.' 1901-1960. Novelist, Folklorist and Anthropologist." Brackett, Virginia. "Zora Neale Hurston." Classic Love and Romance Literature: an Encyclopedia of Works,
Authors, Themes and Characters. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 1999. 173-175. Carr, Glynis. "Storytelling as Bildung in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." College
Language Association Journal 31.2 (December 1987): 189-200. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. "Zora Neale Hurston." The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English
. New York City, New York: Norton, 1996. 1488-1490. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1977. Wall, Cheryl A.
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. New York City, New York: Penguin, 1995.
This lesson was submitted by Virginia Brackett, Ph.D., a professor at Triton College.
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