Historical Context
In
the late nineteenth century in the United States, thousands of blacks fled the
South as racial segregation became more entrenched. To cite only one example, Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark decision in 1896, said the racial
segregation of public transportation was legal. This only added to the feeling that blacks were not welcome
in the South, and made absolutely clear few opportunities for advancement were
available.
At
the beginning of World War I (1914-1918) this migration of blacks to Northern
cities only increased; the white men who fought in the war left jobs which
needed to be filled in a booming, wartime economy.
By the end of this period, about one million Southern blacks had
emigrated North. By the end of the
war, 100,000 had settled in Harlem, NY.
Although
other cities were also destinations for these Southern blacks, Harlem was
especially attractive, as New York was often seen as the largest and most
cosmopolitan of cities. Harlem and
New York quickly became home to many of the most important African American
cultural and political groups, including the NAACP.
In addition, the 1920s in Harlem was a decade of extraordinary creativity
in the arts by African Americans, and is popularly referred to as the Harlem
Renaissance. This remarkable period
of artistic production included poetry, fiction, drama, music, dance, painting
and sculpture. Although some
scholars date the Harlem Renaissance as continuing through to 1940, the crash on
Wall Street in 1929 and the Great Depression was the beginning of the end for
the movement.
Zora
Neale Hurston was, in some senses, a product of the Harlem Renaissance and one
of its most extraordinary writers. She
was also part of this migration: Hurston
was born in Eatonville, Florida (the setting for Their
Eyes Were Watching God) and attended Howard University in Washington D.C.
She arrived in Harlem, New York City in 1925, at the tail end of what is
commonly called “The Great Migration.”
She attended Barnard College, where she studied with the famous
anthropologist Franz Boas, who cultivated her interest in folklore.
Boas also convinced her to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology at
Columbia University. Hurston then
returned to the South to conduct anthropological research for what would become Mules
and Men (1935), which is generally regarded as the first collection of
African American folklore to be compiled and published by an African American.
Interestingly,
rather then setting her novel Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937), in a Northern city, she sets it back in the South.
In Eatonville, she created (or perhaps simply represented, Eatonville as
a real place) a self-sufficient all-black community – Harlem, but on a much
smaller scale. Instead of addressing the issues around urban living, she
instead focuses on African American folktales and folk culture in her careful
representation and examination of the traditional stories, language and culture
of African Americans in the rural South.
Although
today Hurston is celebrated for her depictions of black communities and for her
strong portrayals of women, Hurston was harshly criticized by many of her peers
in the 1930s. Many condemned her
for celebrating black folk culture in art and folklore instead of engaging in
overt political protest against the racial oppression of blacks, especially in
the urban centers where they converged.
