Skip to main content
Tag

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

Witnesses for the Future

By Commentaries/Opinions

Zora Neale Hurston’s drive to tell the story of the slave trade’s last survivor By Emily Bernard, The New Republic — “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. “You shall see how a slave was made a man.” These words herald the moment when Douglass masters his master, the sadistic overseer and “negro-breaker,”…

Read More
The literature on the African slave trade, Hurston wrote, had endless “words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Story of a Former Slave Finally Comes to Print

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

Hurston spent years turning an account of the transatlantic slave trade into a book. Then the manuscript languished for nearly nine decades. By Casey N. Cep — Captain William Foster left Mobile in secret and returned the same way. On July 8, 1860, he dropped anchor in the waters off the coast of Mississippi, hid his cargo below deck, slipped ashore, and travelled overland to fetch a tugboat from Alabama.…

Read More