Wonder Woman of the Week: Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most famous socio-cultural anthropologists of American Anthropology. Her work included examinations of discrimination against minority populations in Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States. During her time studying African-American culture in the US, Hurston's work expanded to recording folklore during an era in US history when most African-American storytelling styles were dying out. Hurston's first ethnography centered around logging camps in Florida where white male laborers would have children with black women as a form of aggressive ownership likened to slave owners in the 1830's.

Hurston's next study brought her to Haiti and Jamaica to study voodoo and where she composed what most literary analysts consider her greatest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel tells the coming-of-age of a young woman in Florida and her path towards finding both herself and her religious beliefs. Hurston traveled next to Central America where she studied in Honduras- with a focus on the Miskito and Garifuna Peoples and their creole cultures of Native and African Peoples.

After returning from Central America, Hurston took a job at a local newspaper in Florida where her editor asked her to investigate the recent murder case of Ruby McCollum- a wealthy African-American woman who allegedly killed a white medical doctor. Hurston believed McCollum had killed the doctor due to the doctor forcing McCollum to have his illegitimate children without her consent- the way white lumberjacks did to African-American women in lumber camps. But upon word of Hurston's conclusion, both she and her newspaper received gag orders and threats. McCollum was later declared guilty by an all-white and all-male jury and was executed.

After Ruby McCollum's case, Zora Neale Hurston found finding work difficult- after making enemies with most of the racism American South. Most of her work in ethnographies and folklore recording fell into obscurity until after her death. But Hurston's fiction and non-fiction novels and works survived as well as the folk tales of 19th Century African-Americans.