A new documentary, “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” focuses on Hurston’s work as one of the country’s first Black women ethnographers and filmmakers
“I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore,’” Hurston wrote in “Mules and Men,” an “auto-ethnographical” collection of stories published in 1935. “In a way, it would not be a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism.”
White anthropologists had long struggled to document Black folklore. Black people, Hurston wrote, mostly distrusted White scientists who sought to study them and collect their culture, songs and knowledge. “We are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, ‘Get out of here!’” Hurston wrote. “We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.
“Through her trailblazing work, Hurston would reclaim, honor and celebrate black life on its own terms — an idea that remains radical today,” PBS said in a statement.“To understand Hurston as an artist and writer, one must understand her as a social scientist,” said Strain, who teaches documentary history at Wesleyan University.
At age 26, Hurston found her way to Baltimore. Cutting 10 years off her age, she worked by day and attended high school by night at Morgan Academy. She later moved to Washington, attending Howard Academy and graduating in 1919. She then enrolled at Howard University.On campus, she joined the Howard Players theater company and met Alain Locke, a philosophy professor who pioneered the “New Negro” movement whose mission was to reshape what White society thought about Black people.
In 1924, Hurston published a short story in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The journal’s editor, Charles S. Johnson, encouraged her to move to New York to join the literary scene. “So, the week of January 1925 found me in New York with a dollar fifty, no job, no friends and a lot of hope,” Hurston wrote.
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