Lisa Nielson, Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Case Western Reserve University’s SAGES program, was profiled in the Plain Dealer’s “My Cleveland” column. In it, she talked about the ease of Northeast Ohio compared to her previous stint in New England and her favorite way to spend time outside of the classroom. Previously on the blog, Lisa shared her thoughts on David Livingstone Smith’s Less Than Human and how it changed her curriculum.
Author: Tara Jefferson
By Lisa Nielson, Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow
Lisa Nielson is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She has a PhD in historical musicology, with a specialization in Women’s Studes, and teaches seminars on the harem, slavery and courtesans.
I was introduced to “Less than Human” last fall when I had the pleasure of hearing David Livingstone Smith speak at the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony and at Case Western Reserve University the next day. His presentation was riveting, and I felt myself vacillating between awe at the breadth of his work and shock at the horror of what humanity has done through dehumanization.
Judging from the taut silence as the awards audience of 800 heard Smith speak, they had a similar reaction. Listeners occasionally gasped as Smith told the story of Ota Benga, a Batwa (“pygmy”) tribesman, who was bought from a slave merchant in what was then called the Congo Free State and put on exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904.
Eventually, Benga was put on display at the newly opened Bronx Zoo, sharing a cage with an orangutan. Black clergy protested, and, “buckling under the pressure of controversy, zoo authorities released Ota Benga from his cage, and allowed him to wander freely around the zoo, where jeering crowds pursued him,” Smith said.
The story ends with Benga succumbing to madness, and putting a bullet through his own heart.
In reflecting on this anecdote and the book, I was struck by Smith’s observation that for all that has been written about genocide, war, and dehumanization, little scholarship centers on why and how. Why have we not studied this process? Does our discomfort prevent us? Or are we afraid of what we might find?
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Smith not only goes into the philosophical and historical development of modes of dehumanization, but how religion, science and biology have been used to bolster both the practice and justification of demeaning others. By delving into how humans identify and react to difference, he also reflects on the cognitive and emotional processes we use.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for me was his inclusion of research into human biology, cognitive science and the animal world. His synthesis of the biologic and psychological impulses behind our ability to dehumanize in comparison to similar species, such as chimpanzees, made a great deal of uncomfortable sense. He finds: 1) we are biologically wired to categorize strangers as “other”, 2) because of our propensity to order our world according to our perception of kinds and essences, there is a definable process we adhere to when categorizing who is “us” and “not us,” 3) as a result, we are all capable of extreme violence or cruelty given the right push, and 4) we are unique in the animal kingdom for so doing.
Smith doesn’t stop there. He confronts us with the reality that perpetrators of genocide are not outliers or “monsters” but often just like us. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil,” he points out that we all have the capability to dehumanize, and argues that we must work to recognize and refute these impulses if we are to rise above them. Since these are complex social and psychological constructs, the same ability that allows us to dehumanize can also help us overcome our innate, and arguably submerged, hard-wired reactions to difference.
The evidence Smith uses to craft his theory shows that our propensity to dehumanization comes out of a complex of biology, social pressure, psychology around real and perceived danger, politics, and propaganda. Yet, our ability to reflect and make the better choice offers some hope for change. Such change, however, requires effort. As Smith notes in his conclusion, we have barely tried.
As the first Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow, I have worked to incorporate explorations of race and diversity into my teaching. When I designed a class on world slavery, it allowed me to introduce books that have won the prize. This spring, I added Smith’s book to my reading list, and began the first week of class with his chapter on slavery, “The Rhetoric of Enmity.”
Student reaction has been profound. The students immediately took to his ideas and incorporated them into their essays and final projects. Some have offered insightful critiques and suggestions for expanding on his theory, while others have used his ideas as a basis from which to interrogate past and present constructions of race, class, sexuality and gender.
Though Smith doesn’t focus specifically on slave systems or gender in “Less than Human,” his outline of the process of dehumanization has changed the way I think about and teach slavery. Is slavery inherently a dehumanizing process, through the fact of being owned? Are there slave systems where this is not the case? How can dehumanization be applied to issues of gender and sexuality? And, in considering the continuation of dehumanization tactics today: What more can I do to help my students critically assess the social and cultural messages they receive?
If we accept that we are all prone to certain kinds of essentialist thinking, it is vital that we give students every tool to challenge their own assumptions, and to listen empathetically to others. This type of intellectual discipline takes a lot of effort, and we need people who can and are willing to do the work. My students at Case have that will and ability, and they inspire me to hope.
For the first time in history, two inaugural poets shared the same stage and spoke about what the experience meant for their lives. Earlier this month, 2009 Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander (also an Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement winner in 2010) and 2013 Inaugural poet Richard Blanco spoke at Yale University, with Blanco making his first public appearance since inauguration.
“I felt a little less exposed with 800,000 people than I do right now,” Blanco joked in front of the small Yale audience. The two spoke about feedback after delivering the poem, Blanco’s writing style, and what role poetry can play in the political realm. The conversation between Alexander and Blanco begins at the 29:30 mark.
Did you enjoy Richard Blanco’s poem “One Today“? The Library of Congress gives a great breakdown of each stanza and the literary influences within.
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, Beloved, took home the Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction in 1988. In it, a slave, unwilling to see her children grow up and live the same fate as their mother, killed one of her children rather than see them in bondage. Eighteen years later, the mother is visited by a young woman who she believes is the slain infant, returned.
However lauded the work may be, not everyone is a fan. Most recently, a Fairfax County parent has petitioned to ban the book based on the book’s content, which she says gave her son nightmares after he read it for his senior-level English class. “I’m not some crazy book burner,” Laura Murphy said. “I have great respect and admiration for our Fairfax County educators. The school system is second to none. But I disagree with the administration at a policy level.”
Of course, Ms. Murphy’s request is nothing new for the novel. According to the American Library Association, Beloved ranks 26th out of the most frequently banned books of the past 10 years. Its content (particularly the infanticide) has certainly disturbed many readers, but it is still lauded for its examination of the African American experience throughout the course of history—both good and bad.
In a 1987 interview with the New York Times, Toni Morrison talked about her inspiration for the book:
”I was amazed by this story I came across about a woman called Margaret Garner who had escaped from Kentucky, I think, into Cincinnati with four children. And she was a kind of cause celebre among abolitionists in 1855 or ’56 because she tried to kill the children when she was caught. She killed one of them, just as in the novel. I found an article in a magazine of the period, and there was this young woman in her 20’s, being interviewed – oh, a lot of people interviewed her, mostly preachers and journalists, and she was very calm, she was very serene. They kept remarking on the fact that she was not frothing at the mouth, she was not a madwoman, and she kept saying, ‘No, they’re not going to live like that. They will not live the way I have lived.'”
Morrison argued that her novel was not about slavery but a broader look at passion, self-sabotage, and the will of a people told they are less than human.
While Ms. Murphy may not succeed, her concerns about what is appropriate for children and young adults are very valid. Have you ever read a book you felt you were too young for, or have your children come home with a book you felt was above their maturity level?
In honor of Ms. Morrison’s 82nd birthday, we’re looking back at our archives for some of our favorite moments from the esteemed author over the past few years. Take a walk down memory lane with us:
“Beloved” is named one of the “88 Books That Shaped America” by the Library of Congress:
Toni Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her post-Civil War novel based on the true story of an escaped slave and the tragic consequences when a posse comes to reclaim her. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, and in 2006 The New York Times named “Beloved” “the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.”
She wins the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom:
In his personal remarks during the ceremony, President Obama said of Morrison’s work, “I remember reading Song of Solomon when I was a kid. Not just trying to figure out how to write, but also how to be. And how to think.”
“Home,” her 10th novel, hits newsstands in 2012:
The Washington Post wrote that in her latest novel, Morrison “has never been more concise, and that restraint demonstrates the full use of her power.” Read more reviews here.
Her legacy moves closer to home
Last year, the Toni Morrison Society, a group of scholars, moved its headquarters from Atlanta to Oberlin, Ohio. Morrison grew up in nearby Lorain, where she still has family. Founded in 1993, the society supports the teaching, reading, and critical examination of Toni Morrison’s works.
In 2011, in the midst of a distinguished career as a journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas revealed that he was living in the United States as an undocumented resident. It was a secret he felt he could keep no longer and against the advice of several immigration lawyers, he wrote a moving essay in The New York Times magazine on his life without permanent U.S. citizenship:
It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
In the past year, he has continued to advocate for the rights of other undocumented residents, many of whom were brought to the United States as children. He is the founder of Define American, which brings the stories of immigrants to the forefront and adds their experiences to the conversation on immigration reform.
Recently, he testified in a Senate Judiciary Committee on immigration.
Where do you fall in the immigration debate? Share your comments with us below. If you’re in Northeast Ohio (or know someone who is), you’ll get a chance to see Vargas at the Town Hall speaker series on February 25. Get more information on tickets here.
As the U.S. economy continues to crawl toward recovery, more and more people find themselves at the library. Filled with resources, computers, books and programs, the local library is often one of the only places people can go to get their information needs met, and unlike most online sources, there are real live people there to offer assistance.
Writers tend to be very vocal champions for libraries, particularly these days as funding is cut while demand is highest. Earlier this year, during an author visit to his local library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Junot Diaz spoke for a few minutes on the importance of libraries, particularly as it relates to his success as an author. “I can directly attribute who I am as a writer, an artist, as a thinker..from my early, early experiences in my school and town library.” Watch his entire remarks below.
Most children learn about Rosa Parks’ contribution to the Civil Rights Movement thusly: She boarded a bus, refused to move to the back of the bus when a white passenger got on board, and was promptly arrested, kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott. Lasting roughly 13 months, the Montgomery bus boycott lead to an official Supreme Court ruling declaring segregation on public transportation unconstitutional.
While that did indeed happen, what is often overlooked is Rosa Parks’ earlier involvement with the civil rights movement. She was a member of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and even served as secretary for NAACP President E.D. Nixon. In honor of what would have been her 100th birthday this year, the Huffington Post recently highlighted some lesser known facts about Rosa Parks, including the fact that she had been thrown off the bus 10 years earlier by the same driver:
She had avoided that driver’s bus for twelve years because she knew well the risks of angering drivers, all of whom were white and carried guns. Her own mother had been threatened with physical violence by a bus driver, in front of Parks who was a child at the time. Parks’ neighbor had been killed for his bus stand, and teenage protester Claudette Colvin, among others, had recently been badly manhandled by the police.
Read the rest of the facts at the link and let us know – did you know any of this about Rosa Parks?
We’re always delighted to read a new piece from 2006 winner Zadie Smith’s mind, as she is one of our favorite authors in the modern age. It’s kind of blasphemous for us to declare we have a favorite (after all, isn’t it like saying, out loud, that you have a favorite child?) but it’s true that Zadie Smith is at the top of our list. (Don’t worry, our list is very wide at the top.)
Her newest piece is an easy read in the New Yorker, called “The Embassy of Cambodia.” Here’s a sneak peek:
Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It’s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!
Next door to the embassy is a health center. On the other side, a row of private residences, most of them belonging to wealthy Arabs (or so we, the people of Willesden, contend). They have Corinthian pillars on either side of their front doors, and—it’s widely believed—swimming pools out back. The embassy, by contrast, is not very grand. It is only a four- or five-bedroom North London suburban villa, built at some point in the thirties, surrounded by a red brick wall, about eight feet high. And back and forth, cresting this wall horizontally, flies a shuttlecock. They are playing badminton in the Embassy of Cambodia. Pock, smash. Pock, smash.
The only real sign that the embassy is an embassy at all is the little brass plaque on the door (which reads, “the embassy of cambodia”) and the national flag of Cambodia (we assume that’s what it is—what else could it be?) flying from the red tiled roof. Some say, “Oh, but it has a high wall around it, and this is what signifies that it is not a private residence, like the other houses on the street but, rather, an embassy.” The people who say so are foolish. Many of the private houses have high walls, quite as high as the Embassy of Cambodia’s—but they are not embassies.
Want to finish the story? Keep reading here. To accompany the short story the New Yorker also did a quick Q&A with Mrs. Smith – here’s one snippet on her writing process:
When I’m writing everything is basically spontaneous. I don’t keep a journal or make notes or plan. I have a vague idea one day, sometimes a tone, or a single image—like the embassy—and even if I don’t really know why it’s stuck with me, it’s interesting (to me) that it has stuck. And then if the idea or image hangs around for long enough—weeks, or months—I sit down and try to write it out and see what it’s about.
Jack Johnson, arguably one of the best heavyweight boxers to ever enter the sport, is about to have his story told on the small screen for the second time. The same man—Ken Burns—will be at the helm of both films. Tom Hanks’ Playtone Productions production company will be joining Burns for the effort.
Burns’ first film, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, was based on Geoffrey C. Ward’s book of the same name. (It also won the Anisfield-Wolf award in 2005.) In it, they profiled Johnson’s undeniable talent amidst the background of a society permeated by racism. Not many details are known yet about this new project, but it will be based on Ward’s book as well, and broken up into a four- or six-part miniseries on HBO.
What would you like for the filmmakers to focus on in this new effort?
Jim Sheeler has no use for celebrity. He is drawn to “regular people, whose names have never been in the paper.”
So when the quiet journalist left Colorado in 2010 and took a job in Cleveland, he went looking for a font of stories he might connect to students of his new employer, Case Western Reserve University. Toggling around the web, Sheeler happened upon the Eliza Bryant Village, the nation’s oldest continually operating African-American nursing home. It had grown since 1897 to be the largest employer in nearby Hough.
“In nursing homes you have people with great stories, time to tell them and stories that would otherwise be lost,” Sheeler told a packed room in Clark Hall Thursday afternoon, assembled to get a taste of wine and cheese and what the students had discovered.
Sheeler, 43, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for his newspaper coverage of Colorado families of soldiers killed in Iraq. He gives off a restless, earnest energy — some of the cemetery workers in Colorado nicknamed him Harry Potter, a nod to his dark, oval glasses and boyish manner. He subscribes to the Joan Didion school of fading-into-the-background reporting.
He began his presentation with Eliza Bryant resident Andrew Bailey, who quickly deflated the interloper’s nifty idea. “The old man told me he didn’t want us to know his story and my heart sank,” Sheeler said. “He was very skeptical about these kids from Case Western and this professor who had come from Colorado and hadn’t known where Hough was until six weeks ago. I realized he was right. We hadn’t earned it.”
So Sheeler and his students slowed down and got acquainted with Bailey. Eventually, he granted them permission to tell the story of Mrs. Bailey, who lived in the dementia unit some 220 steps from her husband’s Eliza Bryant apartment. Wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt and a handsome mustache, Bailey, 77, eventually invited the students to his apartment, and to film his much-trod route to see his wife. Bailey told his visitors that “she changed my life completely,” and taught him compassion. He showed the students his old fishing license, on which he had written the date he took his last drink.
“This was not just a love story,” Sheeler said of the deepening narrative, “this was a story about compassion — the compassion Mrs. Bailey taught him, and the compassion he showed her in the end.”
When the professor delivered an unexpected twist to the couple’s final days, many in the audience were fighting tears. The mood lightened with the next segment, a piece on “The Misfits,” the bowling team at Eliza Bryant that assembles for rousing games of Wii competition. “I tries to keep these bowlers in line,” team captain Delores Bowden said. “We talk a whole lot of trash in there . . . tease and play.”
Eliza Bryant Village opened as the Cleveland Home for Aged Colored People, the first nonreligious institution sponsored by African Americans in the city, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Eliza Bryant herself was born into slavery in North Carolina, but became a free resident of Cleveland. She was alarmed by the suffering of the elderly, many of whom were freed slaves turned away from the segregated institutions of the day. Bryant campaigned for years to raise money for the first home, which began with no gas, furnace or bath at 284 Giddings St. John D. Rockefeller gave some of the initial start-up cash.
“It’s really been remarkable how they’ve grown and changed,” said Robert E. Eckardt, executive vice president of the Cleveland Foundation. “We’ve been involved for a long time. Our $750,000 grant in 1981 was critical to Eliza Bryant to move from a relatively small, old-fashioned facility into a new era.”
Eckardt said the foundation and other partners understood that enhancing a high-quality facility in the inner city was vital to Cleveland, its residents and families, and all those who use the multi-purpose senior center. Sheeler said that importance is made concrete through the residents’ stories, as he explained in the Baker-Nord sponsored session January 31.
Students, who are encouraged to record their own reactions as part of a sophisticated narrative format, can learn about Medicaid and end-of-life questions. But they also have a window on wisdom. “How do we learn to take care the way Mr. Bailey did, and the way Mrs. Bailey taught him?,” Sheeler asked.
“As one gets older, it’s easy to feel invisible,” one woman in the audience responded. “You are giving visibility to people who don’t have it.”
Watch one of the videos at the link.
The Bowling Team from james sheeler on Vimeo.
Let’s start this post off with a story. Imagine if you will, that you are older and your health is failing. You do not have many family members around to help care for you, get you to doctor’s appointments and generally keep an eye on your wellbeing.
Then imagine that the year is 1893. And that you are black.
A fact of life in the years after Reconstruction is that there wasn’t any real option for aging African Americans. Nursing homes were segregated and even homeless shelters would turn away black people at the door. Eliza Bryant, the daughter of freed slaves and a well-known humanitarian in the Cleveland area, found this utterly unacceptable and took on the task of creating a space for the elderly to reside and live with dignity. She helped found the Cleveland Home of Aged Colored People, in 1896, effectively establishing the first nursing home in the country for African Americans.
Today, her legacy stands. The home was been renamed to the Eliza Bryant Village in honor of its founder in the early 2000s.
CWRU professor James Sheeler understood the historical significance of Bryant’s actions and charged his journalism class to capture the stories of the residents who lived there. Students brought microphones, tape recorders, video cameras and more to record the oral histories that, in most circles, had never been told before.
Join us on Thursday, January 31 at the Baker-Nord center (on the Case Western Reserve University campus) for a presentation highlighting the stories of the residents’ of Eliza Bryant, the nation’s oldest African-American nursing home. Register here.
Have your debut novel selected as Oprah’s second selection in her book club and you must expect for your life to change, as Ayana Mathis is now finding out. Once The Twelve Tribes of Hattie received the literary world’s highest blessing from Ms. Winfrey, her publisher rushed it to bookstores to capitalize on the wave of publicity soon to follow. Now, Mathis’ name is on the lips of readers’ everywhere, with Oprah even comparing her to the all-time great, Toni Morrison.
Twelve Tribes is a book looking at generations of a family after their matriarch migrates from Georgia to Pennsylvia in search of a better life. In taking a fictional look at the world Isabel Wilkerson told so well in her acclaimed Warmth of Other Suns, a nonfiction piece, Mathis gives it to us straight – no fantasy, just cold-hard truth. The family goes through more than its fair share of heartache throughout the story. As Mathis says in the below interview with Mathis and Winfrey, perhaps identifying the suffering is our way of releasing pain in our lives. Take a look at the interview and tell us what you think.
On Monday, President Obama delivered his second Inaugural Address in the cold Washington air, laying out a progressive agenda for the next four years. He spoke clearly on the issues of gay marriage, climate change, and social service programs, while pushing members of Congress to work together to solve some of the biggest issues of our time:
Progress does not compel us to settle century’s long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.
For now, decisions are upon us and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.
We must act. We must act knowing that our work will be imperfect (ph). We must act knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years and 40 years and 400 years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.
We perked up when the president spoke of issues of equality and justice, echoing Martin Luther King in his visions for a country where inequality and injustice cease to exist:
What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.
While analysts debate the significance of President Obama’s speech and whether his vision will becoming a political reality in the coming years, we are simply proud to be witnessing history. In a piece for MSNBC, 2009 winner Annette Gordon-Reed wrote that regardless of his policy positions, President Obama has already changed the landscape of American politics:
By virtue of being the first black president—and being re-elected—Barack Obama has already been a transformational figure in American politics and history. We are not a “post-racial” society, certainly. But the president has transformed the sense of what is possible in the country.
- Taylor Branch and Isabel Wilkerson were special guests of the Diane Rehm Show on NPR to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy. One of our favorite quotes from the episode, from Isabel Wilkerson: “Ultimately, what Martin Luther King and the thousands upon thousands of unnamed, unknown people who buttressed his strength and his courage, what they were fighting was a structure that needed to be dismantled in order for justice to prevail in the South.”
- Lani Guinier, the first black woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, will be a featured speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr Celebration at Case Western Reserve University.
- Martin Luther King III spoke on CBS “This Morning” about his father’s legacy and what it means to have the Inauguration and Martin Luther King Jr Day coincide.
On the eve of President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, Yale University hosted a live chat with Elizabeth Alexander, whose “Praise Song Of The Day” was her selection at his first inauguration. Watch the video above for her thoughts on what it’s like to be selected to have a part in such a tremendous day.
1996 winner Jonathan Kozol will be speaking with Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West at the January 17th event, Vision For A New America: A World Without Poverty. In advance of the event, Kozol appeared on the Smiley and West PBS show (link to the full show here) to discuss his new book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America and his work to change education policy to create a more even playing field for impoverished children.
As Dr. West said in his introduction, “There is just nobody like Jonathan Kozol in the culture, going back to 1967 with Death At An Early Age, on through 14 more powerful texts…No one else has been able to keep track of the rich humanity and resiliency of our poor brothers and sisters of all colors.”
In an Art Works podcast hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts, Isabel Wilkerson describes what life was like for African Americans at the turn of the century, at the beginning of the “Great Migration” from the southern states to the northern. It is almost hard to believe that we are only sixty years from this type of lifestyle:
“…many of us believe that we have an understanding of it based on the pictures that we might have seen of the black and white water fountains, for example. But in many ways, that was just the least of it. That was, in some ways, probably what many of them might have been able to live with, considering all that they were really up against. From the moment they would awake in the morning to the moment that they turned in for the night, there were reminders, rules, protocols, expectations, limits, restrictions on every single thing that they might do. In Birmingham, for example, it was against the law for blacks and whites to play checkers together. In courtrooms throughout the South, there was a black Bible and a white Bible to swear to tell the truth on. That meant that if a black person were to take the stand, they could not swear to tell the truth on the same Bible that had just been used for the white eyewitness who might have just testified, so they’d have to stop everything and find a different Bible for that person to use, so that in every sphere of life, anything that could be conceived of was put into law. There were separate staircases, separate telephone booths. Also, interesting enough, one that many young people respond to more than anything is the idea, the fact that an African American motorist was not permitted to pass a white motorist on the road, no matter how slow that motorist might be going. And of course, because a caste system in itself is in some ways hard to maintain–and it lasted for 60 years by law, and longer than that by tradition– it was difficult to maintain. And so therefore, the way to enforce it required violence, and so every four days, somewhere in the South during the time period we’re discussing, the early years of the migration– the early decades of the migration, I should say– there was a lynching of an African American once every four days. And that was what was necessary in order to maintain this caste system, which in some ways was untenable.”
As we wrote before, Isabel Wilkerson has been educating her fans on the impact of the Great Migration by posting stories of prominent African Americans to her Facebook page. Recently, she profiled Zora Neale Hurston, one of our favorite writers and one of the literary world’s greatest treasures.
We loved what she had to say about Hurston so much that we decided to share it with you here:
On this day, January 7, in 1891 or 1901, beloved author Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Ala., to Rev. John and Lucy Hurston. She grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., and went north as a young woman, just as the Great Migration was starting during World War I. She attended what is now Morgan State University and then Howard University, where she got her first story published in the literary magazine, Stylus, and co-founded the student newspaper, the Hilltop, while working odd jobs as a maid and a manicurist.
She went to New York at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and, in 1928, became the first black student known to graduate Barnard College. There, she majored in English and studied anthropology, but was not permitted to live in the dormitories. As was her way, she never complained. She once famously said: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
She would become a renowned folklorist and novelist, acclaimed for her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which some see as drawn from parts of her own life. Five years later, she published an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, about her many journeys, but her star faded as she appeared removed from the changing politics of the day. In 1946, she supported the Republican who was opposing Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, the most famous black politician of the era. Powell won reelection by a landslide, and the election seemed a window into the distance between her southern traditionalism and a growing push for equality in the North.
She returned to Florida and, in January 1960, she died in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Fla., after suffering a stroke. She has grown more legendary in death than even in life after acclaimed novelist Alice Walker went in search of her unmarked grave, erected a headstone in her honor, and helped return her to her rightful place in literary history.
Hurston has inspired generations of writers with her free-spirited wit and imagination and her love of black southern folkways. “I am not tragically colored,” she once said. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes….No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
We highlighted the reboot of Oprah’s book club (dubbed Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 as a nod to the newly added interactive elements) with her first pick, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Now she’s announced her next selection, Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Oprah said, “Not since Toni Morrison have I read a writer whose words have moved me this way.”