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Books by Zora Neale
Hurston
Their Eyes Were
Watching God /
Mules and Men
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Jonah’s Gourd Vine
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Tell
My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories
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Dust
Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond
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Court Order Can't Make Races Mix
By Zora Neale Hurston 1
Editor: I promised God and some other
responsible characters, including a bench of bishops,
that I was not going to part my lips concerning the U.S.
Supreme Court decision on ending segregation in the
public schools of the South. But since a lot of time has
passed and no one seems to touch on what to me appears
to be the most important point in the hassle, I break my
silence just this once. Consider me as just thinking out
loud.
The whole matter revolves around the
self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I
get from a court order for somebody to associate with me
who does not wish me near them? The American Indian has
never been spoken of as a minority and chiefly because
there is no whine in the Indian. Certainly he fought,
and valiantly for his lands, and rightfully so, but it
is inconceivable of an Indian to seek forcible
association with anyone. His well known pride and
self-respect would save him from that. I take the Indian
position.
Now a great clamor will arise in
certain quarters that I seek to deny the Negro children
of the South their rights, and therefore I am one of
those “handkerchief-head niggers” who bow low before the
white man and sell out my own people out of cowardice.
However an analytical glance will show that that is not
the case.
If there are not adequate Negro
schools in Florida, and there is some residual, some
inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools,
impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the
first to insist that Negro children of Florida be
allowed to share this boon. But if there are adequate
Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions,
then there is nothing different except the presence of
white people. For this reason, I regard the ruling of
the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring
my race. Since the days of the never-to-be-sufficiently
deplored Reconstruction, there has been current the
belief that there is no greater delight to Negroes than
physical association with whites. The doctrine of the
white mare. Those familiar with the habits of mules are
aware that any mule, if not restrained, will
automatically follow a white mare. Dishonest
mule-traders made money out of this knowledge in the old
days. Lead a white mare along a country road and slyly
open the gate and the mules in the lot would run out and
follow this mare. This ruling being conceived and
brought forth in a sly political medium with eyes on
’56, and brought forth in the same spirit and for the
same purpose, it is clear that they have taken the old
notion to heart and acted upon it. It is a cunning
opening of the barnyard gate with the white mare ambling
past. We are expected to hasten pell-mell after her.
It is most astonishing that this
should be tried just when the nation is exerting itself
to shake off the evils of Communist penetration. It is
to be recalled that Moscow, being made aware of this
folk belief, made it the main plank in their campaign to
win the American Negro from the 1920’s on. It was the
come-on stuff. Join the party and get yourself a white
wife or husband. To supply the expected demand, the
party had scraped up this-and-that off of park benches
and skid rows and held them in stock for us. The highest
types of Negroes were held to be just panting to get
hold of one of these objects. Seeing how flat that
program fell, it is astonishing that it would be so soon
revived.
Politics does indeed make strange
bedfellows.
But the South had better beware in
another direction. While it is being frantic over the
segregation ruling, it had better keep its eyes open for
more important things. One instance of Govt by fiat has
been rammed down its throat. It is possible that the end
of segregation is not here and never meant to be here at
present, but the attention of the South directed on what
was calculated to keep us busy while more ominous things
were brought to pass. The stubborn South and the Midwest
kept this nation from being dragged farther to the left
than it was during the New Deal.
2
But what
if it is contemplated to do away with the two-party
system and arrive at Govt by administrative decree? No
questions allowed and no information given out from the
administrative dept? We could get more rulings on the
same subject and more far-reaching any day. It pays to
weigh every saving and action, however trivial as
indicating a trend.
In the
ruling on segregation, the unsuspecting nation might
have witnessed a trial-balloon. A relatively safe one,
since it is sectional and on a matter not likely to
arouse other sections of the nation to the support of
the South. If it goes off fairly well, a precedent has
been established. Govt by fiat can replace the
Constitution. You don’t have to credit me with too much
intelligence and penetration, just so you watch
carefully and think. Meanwhile, personally, I am not
delighted. I am not persuaded and elevated by the white
mare technique. Negro schools in the state are in very
good shape and on the improve. We are fortunate in
having Dr. D. E. Williams as head and driving force of
Negro instruction. Dr. Williams is relentless in his
drive to improve both physical equipment and
teacher-quality. He has accomplished wonders in the 20
years past and it is to be expected that he will double
that in the future.
It is
well known that I have no sympathy nor respect for the
“tragedy of color” school of thought
among us, whose fountain-head is the pressure group
concerned in this court ruling. I can see no tragedy in
being too dark to be invited to a white school social
affair. The Supreme Court would have pleased me more if
they had concerned themselves about enforcing the
compulsory education provisions for Negroes in the South
as is done for white children. The next 10 years would
be better spent in appointing truant officers and
looking after conditions in the homes from which the
children come. Use to the limit what we already have.
Thems my
sentiments and I am sticking by them. Growth from
within. Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a
contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality
while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-
association. That old white mare business can go racking
on down the road for all I care.
posted 2 June 2007*
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Zora
Neale Hurston, folklorist and writer, became a central
figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was born and educated
in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black city in the
United States. At the age of 16, she left her home to work with
a traveling theatrical company. The company ended up in New York
City , where Hurston studied anthropology at Columbia
University. She then attended Howard University as well as
Barnard College.
In
1931, Hurston collaborated with Langston Hughes to write the
play
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts. She
wrote her most acclaimed work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
in 1937. After writing her autobiography (Dust Tracks on a
Road) in 1942, she went on to teach at what is now North
Carolina Central University. Her work, revived by feminists in
the 1970s, has gained her considerable recognition as one of the
most important black writers in American history.
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Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
By Robert E. Hemenway (Author) / Foreword
by Alice Walker
Zora
Neale Hurston—novelist, folklorist,
anthropologist, and child of the rural black
South—transformed each hour of her life into
something bubbling, exuberant, and brimming
with her joy in just being. Robert Hemenway
captures the effervescence of this daughter
of the Harlem Renaissance in his brilliant
and original literary biography. He provides
for the first time a full length study of
Hurston's life and art, using unpublished
letters and manuscripts and personal
interviews with many who knew her.
His
sensitive reconstruction of Miss Hurston's
life details her two marriages, her
relations with her patron, Mrs. R. Osgood
Mason, her mentor, Franz Boas, and her
friend Langston Hughes; her indictment on a
morals charge in 1948; and the sad, final
years leading to her death as a penniless
occupant of a Florida welfare home. But most
important, his interpretation of her art and
scholarship, including her extraordinary
novels, autobiography, and popular treatment
of black folkways, underscores her deep and
abiding commitment to the black folk
tradition.
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Ida Cox (February 25, 1896 –
November 10, 1967) was an
African American
singer and
vaudeville performer, best known for her
blues performances and
recordings. She was billed as "The
Uncrowned Queen of the Blues" Cox was born
in February, 1896 as Ida Prather in
Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia (Toccoa was in
Habersham County, not yet
Stephens County at the time), the
daughter of Lamax and Susie (Knight)
Prather, and grew up in
Cedartown, Georgia, singing in the local
African
Methodist Church
choir.
She
left home to tour with travelling
minstrel shows, often appearing in
blackface into the 1910s; she married
fellow minstrel performer Adler Cox. By
1920, she was appearing as a headline act at
the 81 Theatre in
Atlanta, Georgia; another headliner at
that time was
Jelly Roll Morton. . . .—Wikipedia
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Ida Cox—Wild Women Don’t Have
the Blues
Wild Women
Don’t Have the Blues
By
Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their monkey
men
About their trifling husbands and their no
good friends
These poor women sit around all day and moan
Wondering why their wandering papa's don't
come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
Now when you've got a man, don't never be on
the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man right
I keep 'em working hard both day and night
'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have their blues
I've got a disposition and a way of my own
When my man starts kicking I let him find
another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the streets
all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't act
right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't tell
you a lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever get
by
wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues. |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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updated 1 October 2007
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