01/08/2026
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Zora Neale Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo.
The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University.
She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.
She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!
Also published was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.
HER POLITICS:
Hurston was a Republican who was generally sympathetic to the foreign policy non-interventionism of the Old Right and a fan of Booker T. Washington's self-help politics.
Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so), educating Black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education.
Also, she worried about the demise of Black schools and Black teachers as a way to pass on the cultural tradition to future generations of African Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix", that was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955. Hurston had not reversed her long-time opposition to segregation. Rather, she feared that the Court's ruling could become a precedent for an all-powerful federal government to undermine individual liberty on a broad range of issues in the future
She disagreed with the philosophies (including Communism and the New Deal) supported by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was in the 1930s a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems.
John McWhorter has called Hurston "America's favorite 'Black Conservative.' While David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito have argued that she can better be characterized as a libertarian.
Despite much common ground with the Old Right in domestic and foreign policy, Hurston was not a social conservative. Her writings show an affinity for feminist individualism.
In this respect, her views were similar to two libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries: Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.
