Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. 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.
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers and to develop a history and overview of the United States, by state, cities and other jurisdictions. It was launched in 1935 during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One.
Èzili Dantò or Erzulie Dantor is the main loa or senior spirit of the Petro family in Haitian Vodou. Ezili Danto, or Èzili Dantò, is the "manifestation of Erzulie, the divinity of love." It is said that Ezili Danto has a dark complexion and is maternal in nature. The Ezili are feminine spirits in Haitian Vodou that personify womanhood. The Erzulie is a goddess, spirit, or loa of love in Haitian Voudou. She has several manifestations or incarnations, but most prominent and well-known manifestations are Lasirenn, Erzulie Freda, and Erzulie Dantor. There are spelling variations of Erzulie, the other being Ezili. They are English interpretations of a Creole word, but do not differ in meaning.
John the Conqueror, also known as High John de Conqueror, John, Jack, and many other folk variants, is a deity from the African-American spiritual system called hoodoo. He is associated with the roots of Ipomoea purga, the John the Conqueror root or John the Conqueroo, to which magical powers are ascribed in African-American folklore, especially among practitioners of Hoodoo. Muddy Waters mentions him as Johnny Cocheroo in the songs "Mannish Boy" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man". In "Mannish Boy", the line is "I think I'll go down/To old Kansas too/I'm gonna bring back my second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo". This line is borrowed from the Bo Diddley song "I'm a Man", to which "Mannish Boy" is an answer song. In "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man", it is called "John De Conquer Blue".
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).
The Zora Neale Hurston House is a historic house at 1734 Avenue L in Fort Pierce, Florida. Built in 1957, it was the home of author Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) from then until her death. On December 4, 1991, it was designated as a U.S. National Historic Landmark.
The Hilltop is the student newspaper of Howard University, a historically black college located in Washington, D.C. Co-founded in 1924 by Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Eugene King, The Hilltop is the first and only daily newspaper at a historically black college or university (HBCU) in the United States.
Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, and also known as Cudjo Lewis, was the third-to-last adult survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Together with 115 other African captives, he was brought to the United States on board the ship Clotilda in 1860. The captives were landed in backwaters of the Mobile River near Mobile, Alabama, and hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery, and remained undiscovered until May 2019.
The schooner Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859 or on July 9, 1860, with 110 African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m).
Africatown, also known as AfricaTown USA and Plateau, is a historic community located three miles (5 km) north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. It was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States. The Atlantic slave trade had been banned since 1808, but 110 slaves held by the Kingdom of Dahomey were smuggled into Mobile on the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled to try to conceal its illicit cargo. More than 30 of these people, believed to be ethnic Yoruba, Ewe, and Fon, founded and created their own community in what became Africatown. They retained their West African customs and language into the 1950s, while their children and some elders also learned English. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, a founder of Africatown, lived until 1935 and was long thought to be the last survivor of the slaves from the Clotilda living in Africatown.
Kim Roberts is an American poet, editor, and literary historian who lives in Washington, D.C.
Charlotte Osgood Mason, born Charlotte Louise Van der Veer Quick, was a white American socialite and philanthropist. She contributed more than $100,000 to a number of African-American artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, equal to more than $1 million in 2003. This was especially critical during the Great Depression, when foundation support declined. She helped young artists become established.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
A barracoon is a type of barracks used historically for the internment of enslaved or criminal human beings.
"Sweat" is a short story by the American writer Zora Neale Hurston, first published in 1926, in the first and only issue of the African-American literary magazine Fire!!. The story revolves around a washerwoman and her unemployed husband.
Dust Tracks on a Road is the 1942 autobiography of Black American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.
Emma Langdon Roche was an American writer and artist, best known for her work Historic Sketches of The South (1914).
Redoshi was a West African woman who was enslaved and smuggled to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020, she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 by the West African kingdom of Dahomey, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States in violation of U.S. law. She was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington M. Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.
Ann Graves Tanksley is an American artist. Her mediums are representational oils, watercolor and printmaking. One of her most noteworthy bodies of work is a collection based on the writings of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The Hurston exhibition is a two hundred plus piece collection of monotypes and paintings. It toured the United States on and off from 1991 through 2010.
