DISCOVERING ZORA - Florida Humanities Council

PRESS RELEASE: Immediate
Florida Humanities Council
Discovering Zora
120 TEACHERS FROM AROUND U.S.
VISIT A SMALL TOWN IN FLORIDA THIS SUMMER
TO LEARN ABOUT A MAJOR AMERICAN WRITER AND SCHOLAR
Zora Neale Hurston never won fortune and earned only fleeting fame
during her lifetime. And yet this summer, teachers from as far away as New York,
Oregon and Texas are traveling to a small, historic Florida town to learn about
her life and work.
Hurston, who died a pauper in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave,
is now widely recognized as a major novelist, folklorist and anthropologist who
recorded the stories of black Floridians during the first half of the 20th century.
Some 120 teachers from elementary, middle and high schools around the
country (including several from Florida), are attending weeklong Hurston
workshops conducted by the Florida Humanities Council (FHC), a statewide
nonprofit organization that sponsors programs on Florida’s history and cultural
heritage.
The June workshops, the first of their kind, are based in Hurston’s
hometown of Eatonville, the nation’s oldest incorporated African-American
community, 10 miles north of Orlando. Led by distinguished historians, folklorists
and literary scholars, the workshops are designed to enrich teachers’ knowledge
of an important figure in American culture and provide content for classroom
curricula.
As part of their activities, the teachers will meet with longtime Eatonville
residents to explore how the tight-knit community nurtured the indomitable spirit
that took Hurston to heights virtually unheard of for a black woman of her day.
Eatonville afforded the young Zora room to roam and to use her imagination,
exposed her to books and storytelling, and provided her with strong black role

models—and with much material for her books. In Eatonville, she was encouraged
to achieve.
“Jump at de sun,” Hurston’s mother told the young Zora and her siblings.
“We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”
Hurston went on to graduate from the prestigious Barnard College and
become one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Yorkbased
African-American cultural movement that blossomed in the 1920s.
During a career that stretched over more than 30 years, Hurston emerged
as a powerful literary presence, publishing four novels, two books of folklore, an
autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.
Her masterwork is considered to be the 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching
God,” which was adapted for a television movie in 2005 by Oprah Winfrey’s
Harpo Productions.
Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd, one of the scholars speaking at the
workshops, writes that Eatonville’s special qualities were key to Hurston’s later
successes.
“Essentially everything that Zora Hurston would grow up to write, and to
believe, had its genesis in Eatonville,” Boyd writes in “Wrapped in Rainbows.”
“Anywhere Zora looked, she could see the evidence of black achievement. She
could look toward town hall and see black men, including her father, formulating
the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday schools of both
the town’s churches and see black women, including her mother, directing the
Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the store owned by Eatonville
founder Joe Clarke and see black men and women passing worlds through their
mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.”
Many of these stories made their way into her novels and collections of
folklore. Hurston, trained as an anthropologist at Barnard, collected African-
American folklore and folk songs in Florida for the Depression-era Federal
Writers Project, a program of the U.S. Works Progress Administration. (Much of
this material is available online through the U.S. Library of Congress website,
“Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections.”)
The teachers at the Florida workshops are researching Hurston

documents archived at Rollins College in nearby Winter Park. They are also
seeing Chautauqua-style portrayals of Hurston and attending theatrical
presentations featuring the songs and stories that Hurston collected during the
1930s in Central Florida.
These on-site workshops are funded by a grant of nearly $200,000 from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, FHC’s affiliate organization. FHC’s
previous on-site workshops funded with major NEH grants were held over the
past four summers in St. Augustine. Those workshops, titled “Between Columbus
and Jamestown: Spanish St. Augustine,” were attended by nearly 700 teachers
from across Florida and the United States. In total, these FHC workshops have
brought more than $1 million in federal funds to Florida to educate teachers about
Florida’s special heritage.
Joining FHC as cosponsors of the Hurston workshops are Rollins College
and the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. Rollins will house the
teachers.
Although Hurston was a prolific and gifted writer, she fell on hard times in
the 1940s. After World War II she was a virtual unknown, working odd jobs until
her health failed. She had a stroke and died penniless in 1960 at age 69 in Fort
Pierce, on Florida’s East Coast, where she had been working as a substitute
teacher. Friends took up a collection to pay for her funeral, but her grave
remained unmarked until 1973 when a young writer named Alice Walker
searched it out.
Walker, author of the celebrated novel “The Color Purple,” wrote an essay
in 1975 that sparked a rediscovery of Hurston. The cities of Eatonville and Fort
Pierce began holding annual festivals and other events celebrating Hurston’s life
and work. Scholars and cultural organizations rediscovered Hurston and placed
her work beside that of top-tier American writers. In 2003 the U.S. Postal Service
featured Hurston’s portrait on a postage stamp, praising her as one who
represents “the very best of America’s cultural heritage.”
Teachers at the FHC workshops are traveling to Fort Pierce to visit
Hurston’s gravesite, now marked with a tombstone purchased by novelist Walker.
The plain, gray marker is inscribed:

Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.
To learn more about the Florida Humanities Council, visit www.flahum.org.
Contact:
Barbara O'Reilley
Communications Director
Florida Humanities Council
599 2nd Street South
St. Petersburg, FL 33701-5005
ph: (727) 873-2012
fax: (727) 873-2014
email: boreilley@flahum.org
web: www.flahum.org