Published March 23, 2026
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This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack; Kathleen Barker; and Deb Fowler.
TRANSCRIPT
Deb Fowler: Hello, and welcome to UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities — A Podcast. I’m Deb Fowler, co-founder of History UnErased.
Zora Neale Hurston, a giant of the Harlem Renaissance (and beyond), wrote, “Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.” During her lifetime, Zora certainly couldn’t hide her “it”: her flare, her fierceness, her genius, and her brazen, boundary-breaking talent.
Zora Neale Hurston was almost lost to history; but, thankfully, her work was resurrected and we, and generations to come, will be able to learn about her. Take it away, Kathleen!
Kathleen Barker: Imagine a town in Florida where, in the early twentieth century, Black inhabitants governed themselves. Where a Black mayor presided over Black-owned businesses and community organizations, and where children grew up without constant reminders that the color of their skin was a limitation. One of those towns was Eatonville, Florida, and one of those children was Zora Neale Hurston.
Zora was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891. She was the sixth of nine children born to Lucy Potts Hurston and John Hurston. The family moved to Eatonville in 1893, and there John became a popular preacher, and served as a three-time mayor. Lucy taught Sunday school and gave music lessons, and the couple was much-loved and respected. As a child, Zora was a self-described tomboy, who read voraciously, and questioned everything and everyone. She absorbed the stories told by Joe Clarke on the front porch of his general store, and spent plenty of time exploring the flora and fauna of Florida.
Sadly, her mother, Lucy passed away in 1904, when Zora was only 13 years old. With Lucy gone, the family scattered. Her father remarried quickly, to a younger woman that Zora didn’t really care for (they actually had a fistfight on the front lawn of the family home when Zora was still a teenager). Zora was shuttled between relatives, enrolled in boarding school in Jacksonville, then largely left to fend for herself. The loss of her mother affected her deeply and left a permanent mark on her writings. Scholars have noted that themes of motherlessness, displacement, and the hunger for belonging run through virtually all of Zora’s fiction.
By her twenties, Zora had worked as a waitress, a manicurist, and a wardrobe girl for a traveling theater troupe, saving money to put towards her schooling. She was well-educated, although her academic path was anything but straightforward. She enrolled in a high school in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1917, at age 26, telling everyone she was 10 years younger than she actually was. (For the rest of her life Zora would shave years off of her actual age, sometimes even 15 or 20 years!) After high school she attended Howard University from 1919 to 1923, majoring in English. While at Howard she joined the University's exclusive student-run literary magazine Stylus. She even served as co-editor of the magazine under the guidance of faculty member Alain Locke, who would become the leading philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, Zora wasn’t able to complete her degree at Howard due to illness and lack of funds.
After leaving school, she channeled all of her energy into writing. Her short story "Drenched in Light" was published in Opportunity, a prominent African American journal, in December 1924. The short story is centered on Isis Watts, a joyous and imaginative young Black girl in rural Florida who struggles against her strict grandmother’s rigid expectations. The magazine’s publisher, Charles Johnson, was so impressed by Zora's work that he personally invited her to throw her hat into the ring for the journal's first-ever literary contest.
So, in 1925, Zora Neale Hurston stepped off a train in New York City with, according to her, one dollar and fifty cents in her pocket, and "the map of Dixie on her tongue.” Namely, a thick Southern accent and not much else. Fast forward to May 1, 1925. Zora walked into the Opportunity Literary Awards dinner. Over 300 people packed into this room, including writers, critics, and arts patrons. Zora walked out of that dinner with a second-place fiction prize, a second-place drama award, and two honorable mentions. Then came the after-party. The room was full of Black writers, white patrons, and the people who ran New York's literary world. And Zora Neale Hurston walked in, grabbed a long, colorful scarf, threw it around her neck with full theatrical energy, and bellowed across the room: "Colooooooor Struuuckkkk!.” The title of her winning play. She made quite an impression that night, and one person who took notice was Annie Nathan Meyer, co-founder of Barnard College. She offered Zora admission on the spot — a moment that would change the entire course of Zora's life.
First, Zora needed to support herself. After meeting Zora at the awards dinner, Fannie Hurst, one of the most famous and commercially successful novelists in America at the time, hired Zora as a live-in secretary. This arrangement didn’t last long since Zora was, by most accounts, a terrible secretary. Hurst and Zora, however, became lifelong friends, but their relationship wasn’t without its tensions. Hurst was white, wealthy, and well-connected. Her most famous novel, Imitation of Life (published in 1933), centers on a Black woman and her light-skinned daughter who passes as white. Many critics took note of the racist stereotypes embedded in the book, which offered a patronizing white view of Black life. Zora herself had complicated feelings about the book. She would actually wrestle with this tension her entire career, lamenting the dynamic between Black artists and the white patrons who supported them but didn't always truly see them.
But back to life at Barnard. It was certainly an interesting experience for Zora. She was the first Black woman admitted to the college, and she was not permitted to reside in the dormitories. Her classmates were often dismissive of her southern drawl, especially in French class. Nevertheless, she persisted. On February 29, 1928, Hurston received her undergraduate degree, becoming the first African American student known to have graduated from Barnard. She graduated with a major in English and a minor in geology. Along with her B.A., she was also awarded a fellowship by the Rosenwald Foundation for two years of anthropological work at Columbia University, where she studied under Franz Boas. Boas is considered the father of American anthropology, and he basically reshaped how the entire field thought about race, culture, and human difference. He was an advocate of the theory of cultural relativism: the idea that no one culture is superior to another, and every culture must be examined and interpreted within its own context. He trained Zora to observe culture with rigor and without condescension. He became a mentor and champion for her, helping her secure funding to go back to the South and collect the Black folklore she'd grown up with. But before she went south to do fieldwork, however, Zora immersed herself in the culture of Harlem. And Harlem, in 1925, was on fire.
The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing in the 1920s. Imagine it: in the same square miles of upper Manhattan, you had Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen publishing poetry, Duke Ellington playing the Cotton Club and Gladys Bentley performing at the Clam House, Marcus Garvey organizing mass politics, and editors at the NAACP debating what "respectable" Black art was supposed to look like. What distinguished Zora in this world was not just her talent, but her background and point of view. She was Southern, and she wrote in Black vernacular dialect at a time when many of her peers considered dialect a liability, something that pandered to white stereotypes, or worse, reminded wealthy Black readers of a past they were trying to leave behind. Zora, though, believed that the Black speech she included in her work was not degraded English, but a poetic and accurate representation of the people and places she was writing about.
Zora’s Harlem was unabashedly loud and queer. Her inner circle included novelist Wallace Thurman, writer Langston Hughes, artist Richard Bruce Nugent, who published some of the first overtly queer Black fiction in American history, and a rotating cast of writers, painters, and artists. One of the circle’s projects was the short-lived but influential journal Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, published in 1926. The goal was to express the changing attitudes of younger African Americans, and articles and stories published in the first (and only) issue explored topics including homosexuality, interracial relationships, prostitution, and discrimination based on skin tone. Zora’s prize-winning play, “Color Struck” also appeared in the issue. Unfortunately for its creators, the magazine was not universally well-received. Some readers worried that the publication did not represent the sophisticated self-image of Blacks in Harlem, especially some of the pieces that used slang or vernacular. Other readers found the contents offensive or vulgar. Ironically, the warehouse containing issues of Fire!! burned down, thus putting a final nail in the journal’s coffin.
In 1927, prior to her graduation from Barnard, Hurston was awarded a $1,400 fellowship from the American Folklore Society and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She drove back to Florida in her two-seater Nash coupe, which she named “Sassy Susie,” to collect folk tales, songs, and ceremonies from Black communities. While in Mobile, Alabama, she picked up a friend: Langston Hughes! Together they drove through cities like Montgomery and Savannah, stopped at Tuskegee University, and raced to Macon in time to catch a Bessie Smith performance. Along the way, they compared notes from their Southern travels, exchanged ideas, and documented songs, sayings, and folk traditions, the very material that would inform their greatest work.
Zora occasionally found fieldwork a bit more difficult than she had anticipated. She was an outsider now, a college-educated woman with a research agenda. The people she wanted to talk to had learned, across generations, to be wary of curious strangers. She found her groove, though, by returning home to Eatonville. For two years, she sat on porches, drank with turpentine boilers and loggers, and attended church. She collected hundreds of stories! She published some of them in articles for the Journal of American Folklore in 1930 and 1931, and she staged performances in early 1932, which featured songs, dances, and other folk traditions she had collected. In 1935, Zora published Mules and Men, the first book of Black American folklore collected and written by a Black American.
She was becoming better known as an author in the 1930s, but she never made enough money from her writings to make ends meet and she was constantly looking for ways to supplement her income. So in 1935, she sought employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a relief agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to employ thousands of workers affected by the Great Depression. On her first job with the WPA, she joined folklorist Alan Lomax and New York University Professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for a collecting trip in Georgia and Florida. Lomax was collecting Black folk songs for the Library of Congress, and as a leading expert in Black Southern folk culture, Hurston helped him make contacts and find new material. The team recorded folk songs at St. Simons Island, Georgia, before heading to Florida and making stops in Eatonville, Belle Glade, the Everglades, and Miami.
Zora and her team captured a range of songs in the field, several of which Zora recorded at WPA headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida, in June 1939. Some were railroad songs she'd been collecting across Florida since the early 1930s. Tunes like "Gonna See My Long-Haired Babe" and "Dat Old Black Gal" were spiking songs, sung to keep hammer gangs in sync as they drove spikes into the railroad tracks. Here’s Zora singing "Dat Old Black Gal.”
And then there were broader work songs like "Wake Up, Jacob," and "Mule on the Mount,” which Hurston called the most widely sung work song in America, with verses that were still evolving as she recorded it. Here’s Zora discussing, and signing, “Mule on the Mount.”
The team collected several songs from Floridians who migrated from the Bahamas and Sea Islands, those barrier islands off the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Here’s an example of a song from Nassau, “Mama Don't Want No Peas, No Rice,” which would have been sung at jumping dance and fire dance ceremonies. Zora refers to the song’s African roots in her recording.
Hurston also captured blues tunes and songs that were a bit more risque, like "Uncle Bud," "Ever Been Down," and "Po' Gal." In this recording she described "Uncle Bud" as a ”jook song,” not meant for mixed company, and definitely not something you’d sing in front of respectable ladies. “Jook” was a word used to describe informal establishments–or joints– for music, dancing, gambling, and drinking. But here's what's interesting: Zora learned these from women who had spent time in spaces usually reserved for men. Her ability to cross those social boundaries, to gain access to songs guarded by gender or age, is a big part of what makes her folk music catalog so rich. Here’s Zora’s recording of “Uncle Bud.”
Zora Neale Hurston: “Uncle Bud is not a work song. It's a sort of social song for amusement, and it's so widely distributed. It's going all the time by incremental repetition. And it is known all over the South. No matter where you go, you can find verses of Uncle Bud. And it's the favorite song- and the men get to working in every kind of way, and they just yell down on Uncle Bud and nobody particularly leads it. Everybody puts in his voice when he gets ready. And Uncle Bud goes and goes and goes.
Uncle Bud's a man, a man like this.
He can't get a woman, gonna use his fist.
Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud.
Going to town, going to hurry back.
Uncle Bud's got something I sure do like.
Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud.
Oh, little cat, big cat…(fades out)
In the late summer of 1936, Zora Neale Hurston went to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship to research Vodou. She was supposed to be researching, but instead, she wrote a novel in just fifty-six days called Their Eyes Were Watching God. Published in 1937, the novel tells the story of Janie Crawford, a Black Southern woman whose journey to independence and self-discovery is told through her three marriages. In some ways, the story was also Zora’s attempt to reconcile one of her own relationships. The man behind the novel was, by Hurston's own account, a younger man she identified only as A.W.P. in her autobiography, later confirmed by scholars as Percival Punter, a Columbia student she met in New York. Janie Crawford could be viewed as a stand-in for Zora: a woman who desires deeply, loses repeatedly, but ultimately refuses to let anyone else define the terms of her life.
While Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered a masterpiece today, not everyone was enamoured with the novel when it was first published. Novelist Richard Wright was particularly critical, noting in his review that the novel failed to engage seriously with the social and political realities facing Black Americans, in particular the violence and systemic racism of the Jim Crow South. He also criticized Zora’s use of Black Southern dialect and folk culture. He believed it was written more for a white audience's entertainment than as an authentic literary expression. He felt the novel was more concerned with romantic and personal themes than with the kind of protest literature he believed African American writers should be engaged with in that historical moment. Zora pushed back on the idea that Black writers were obligated to produce protest literature. She felt that approach reduced Black characters to symbols of suffering rather than full human beings.
Zora continued with her work in Jamaica and Haiti, researching African-derived spiritual practices that Euro-American scholars, primarily white men, had consistently dismissed as superstition or savagery. Tell My Horse, published in 1938, documented Vodou with a seriousness and insider's perspective that conventional anthropology had largely overlooked. Zora was allegedly initiated into Vodou herself, one of the few outsiders granted that access. Photographs from her Haiti fieldwork show her as a participant in Voudu ceremonies, not merely an observer.
Zora had an eye for the marginal figures in the communities she visited: the women who refused to live submissive lives, and the men who moved through the world in ways that defied the rigid gender codes of the Jim Crow South. Several queer theorists have argued that Hurston's ethnographic attention was shaped by her own experience of inhabiting multiple, often contradictory identities at once: Black and formally educated at a time when both together marked you as an anomaly; Southern-born but Northern-polished; feminine in presentation yet fiercely willful in a world that punished willfulness in women; and erotically alive in ways that resisted neat categorization.
The fieldwork years were some of the most productive of Hurston's life, but also some of the most precarious. The fieldwork, the travel, the books, they were funded largely by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow who was also the patron of Langston Hughes and several other Harlem Renaissance figures. Mason was generous but controlling, and her views about Black creativity were rather primitivist: she believed Black artists were in touch with something instinctive and primal that civilization had killed in white people, and she wanted to own access to it. Zora and Mason had a long and close relationship, but it was deeply complicated. The contract Hurston signed gave Mason ownership over the folklore she collected. When the relationship finally broke down, over money, creative control, and Zora’s refusal to be owned, it was ugly on both sides.
Another important relationship of Zora’s also broke down in the 1930s. In typical Zora fashion the dissolution of her friendship with Langston Hughes was fiery. At its core was a dispute about authorship of their co-written play Mule Bone. They had worked on it together, but when Langston discovered that Zora was attempting to stage and publish the play without crediting him as co-author, the friendship effectively ended. The dispute was messy and painful, and involved their shared patron, Mason, as well as a mutual friend, Louise Thompson. Zora was jealous of Louise and her close relationship with Langston, and Zora accused her of contributing to the script (which Langston denied). Despite the intervention of their mutual friend, photographer Carl van Vechten, the two never fully reconciled, and Mule Bone was not produced during either of their lifetimes.
Zora faced controversies in the 1940s and 1950s that would also challenge her connections to the Black intellectual community. In September 1948, she was arrested and charged with sexually molesting a ten-year-old boy. The charges were false, fabricated by the mother of a disturbed child who had made similar allegations against multiple adults. Zora was in Honduras at the time the alleged offense supposedly occurred, and her passport proved it. The case was dismissed, but the damage was done. The Baltimore Afro-American published the story anyway, in lurid detail, under a headline that emphasized the sexual nature of the charge. Hurston wrote to her publisher that the story "destroyed" her. The cruelest irony, she said, was that she had spent her career writing about Black people's inner lives with dignity, and a Black newspaper had chosen to destroy her with a lie.
She spent much of the 1950s in Florida, working odd jobs, struggling with illness, and largely cut off from the literary world she had helped build. She also provoked controversy by publishing a letter in the Orlando Sentinel in 1955, opposing the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. She was not advocating for segregation, or opposed to integration. She was trying to make a point about the implicit premise of the ruling: that Black children could only learn effectively in the presence of white children. That argument, she wrote, was an insult to Black teachers, Black schools, and Black communities that had built institutions of extraordinary quality under conditions of violent oppression. As so often happens, her complex and nuanced argument was reduced to a sound byte. Her letter was seized upon by segregationists as evidence that a prominent Black intellectual agreed with them. It was a painful irony that a woman who had spent her life celebrating the richness and self-sufficiency of Black culture would be remembered, in her final years, as an unwitting ally of those who sought to destroy Black culture.
In 1959, Zora suffered a stroke. She had no money and few visitors. She entered the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she died on January 28, 1960. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. Her manuscripts were nearly burned by the woman tasked with cleaning out her cottage, but a neighbor saved them from the fire at the last moment.
How does a writer of this magnitude disappear? The answer involves racism, sexism, a false criminal charge, a political miscalculation, old vendettas, and a publishing industry that had no institutional memory for Black women's work. It also involves the question of what happens to people who refuse to be parsed into clear-cut roles and identities. Zora and her work were intersectional and not easily categorized.
In the spring of 1973, a young Black novelist drove to Fort Pierce, Florida, to find a grave. She had no street address, only a rough idea of which cemetery, and a general knowledge that the grave was unmarked. She walked the grounds in the heat until she found a sunken rectangle in the weeds that felt, to her, like the right place. She bought a headstone and had it engraved: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South." That novelist's name was Alice Walker, who would go on to win the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her acclaimed novel, The Color Purple! In 1975, Walker published the article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. Magazine. The piece was personal: a Black woman writer explaining, to a mainstream audience, why another Black woman writer who had been allowed to disappear was in fact indispensable.
Walker wrote about reading Their Eyes Were Watching God and finding, for the first time, a literary ancestor who looked like her, thought like her, and refused in the same ways she refused. Scholars who had never heard the name began to read. What followed was a collective literary recovery! Black feminist scholars like Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Cheryl Wall, Mary Helen Washington began exploring and analyzing Zora’s work, providing her with a permanent place in the American literary canon.
Queer scholars arrived a little later, and with different lenses of analysis. We know that Hurston was married three times, briefly, to men. She was also, as evidenced by her letters and the testimony of people who knew her, romantically and sexually engaged with women. Biographers have noted the intensity of certain female relationships in her correspondence, letters that move beyond the conventions of friendship into something more ardent. Her friendship with the writer Ethel Waters, for example, had a charged quality that even Zora’s contemporaries noted. Her fiction handles female desire with an intimacy that reads, to many, as autobiographical. Although Zora never really commented publicly on her sexuality, she is a model of someone who lived at the intersection of multiple identities and refused to let any one of them be the whole story.