In the anthropological canon, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) has emerged in recent decades as one of the most important—and overlooked—ethnographers of her time. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but poor health and financial troubles plagued her final years. After Hurston’s passing in 1960, Alice Walker rediscovered her unmarked grave (along with much of her work) thirteen years later. Walker, a prominent novelist, championed Hurston’s literary contributions and promoted her oeuvre (Walker 1975). Following this resurgence, Hurston’s manuscripts, plays, and films continue to posthumously circulate. Her most recent print release, The Life of Herod the Great, became available in early 2025 and acts as a sequel to her 1939 biblical retelling, Moses, Man of the Mountain. As Hurston’s work continues to emerge through the press and on screen, those who seek to understand the uneven and unpredictable trajectory of her life actively mediate her legacy.
Throughout her most active years, Hurston’s life was marked by her constant movements. She never stayed in one place for long, a restlessness reflected in the wide range of topics that captured her interest, including Hoodoo, dance, theater, folklore, and creative writing. Still, her life and work are most associated with a few key places: her childhood home and first research site in Eatonville, Florida; Harlem, where she played a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance alongside writers like Langston Hughes; and the Caribbean, where she conducted Guggenheim-supported research in Haiti and Jamaica.
When I moved to North Carolina at the start of my doctoral program, I was surprised to learn that Zora Neale Hurston also lived in Durham from 1939-1940. While her time in Durham was brief and often goes undiscussed, Hurston’s year in North Carolina deserves closer inspection.
Just two years after the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, her most famous novel, Hurston taught theater at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a historically Black college (or HBCU) in Durham. She had already written several plays by this time, and she hoped to explore the relationship between folklore and theater when she arrived in North Carolina. She gave various lectures on this subject in Durham and nearby Chapel Hill, like her address during the 1939 Carolina Dramatic Association annual meeting (Figure 1).
Hurston’s decision to teach at NCCU also reflected her long-standing support for Black-led institutions: she herself received an associate’s degree from Howard University, another prominent HBCU in D.C. Still, her position at NCCU came with its challenges, particularly because the institution was chronically underfunded, especially compared to its neighbor, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) (The North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development 2010). Hurston also quickly discovered that her adventurous, spunky way of doing things was not appreciated by NCCU’s president, James E. Shepard (Boyd 2004, 337; Hurston 1995, 847). Shepard, a trained pharmacist and pious educator, hoped NCCU would serve as a religious center for young missionaries-in-training when he founded the school in 1909 (Durham County Library n.d.). Hurston, on the other hand, was much more interested in theater, magic, and anthropology. She left the Durham area to begin ethnographic fieldwork in South Carolina after just one academic year.
Alongside her brief stint at NCCU, primary source materials reveal that Hurston also came to Durham to collaborate with faculty at UNC, a university that was segregated at the time and did not admit Black undergraduates until 1955. In a letter to a mentor, Hurston mentioned that she was especially excited to participate in courses with Paul Green, a UNC professor in the Dramatic Art Department. He invited Hurston to join a playwriting class after hearing her address to the Carolina Dramatic Association (Figure 1; Boyd 2004). Like Hurston, he was fascinated by Black folk theater, which led him to write several progressive plays about Black life in the South. He welcomed Hurston into the UNC classroom, even when white students protested (Boyd 2004, 328-9). Their shared interests linked Green to Hurston for the rest of her life; Green was among the few to seek out her unmarked grave following her death (Hemenway 1971).
Green’s playwriting class was not the only UNC course to mention Hurston: the March 30, 1940 issue of UNC’s on-campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, lists Hurston as a student in Green’s spring radio class (Figure 3). Outside of these two classes, Hurston also regularly lectured, visited courses, and participated in theater activities at UNC throughout her year in Durham. For example, when the Carolina Playmakers, UNC’s renowned theater troupe, held a regional theater festival in 1940, Hurston led a session on “Negro Drama on the South” on April 5 (The Daily Tar Heel 1940; Spearman 1970, 80).
Together, these sources indicate that Hurston informally participated in classes and contributed to campus life at UNC. However, due to UNC’s segregated campus, there is no trace of her in official graduate or undergraduate student rosters, yearbooks, or other public records. Moreover, classes would have had to adapt to include a Black student. For example, the radio production course was funded by the University Extension Division and met off campus, likely to circumvent policies preventing the formal participation of Black students (Young 1939; Boyd 2004; Babatunde 2018). Thus, I delineate Hurston’s affiliation with UNC solely through letters and local newspapers, which occasionally reported on lectures, classes, and other engagements she was involved with on campus. These sources show that though her association with UNC was unconventional, it still existed.
Hurston’s biographers speak little of her time as a faculty member at NCCU and even less about her decision to affiliate with UNC.[1]See https://cityoffortpierce.com/412/Timeline-of-Zora-Neale-Hurston; https://www.loc.gov/collections/zora-neale-hurston-plays/articles-and-essays/timeline/1936-to-1941/; https://chdr.cah.ucf.edu/hurstonarchive/?p=chronology. Despite the renaissance of Hurston’s work into the mainstream, these other aspects of her life remain obscure in ways that make it difficult to fully capture the depth and breadth of her anthropological and literary legacy. This work of claiming and acknowledging Hurston’s contributions can more effectively circumvent the social, historical, and political forces that seek to erase the contributions of those unable or unwilling to formally engage with white institutions. The vitality of this endeavor emerges especially in the recent debate over renaming a UNC building, which highlights the ways Hurston’s legacy is shaped—and suppressed.
In 2015, the UNC Board of Trustees voted to rename a campus building previously named after KKK leader William L. Saunders. Students proposed Zora Neale Hurston’s name as an alternative. The Trustees voted overwhelmingly in favor of changing the name, but they chose not to honor Hurston (Svrluga 2015; Babatunde 2018). Despite the widespread support for her name to grace the building, the Board opted to name the building “Carolina Hall.” The decision not to rename a UNC building after Hurston, despite popular support, demonstrates how her contributions continue to remain marginalized and thus hidden.
In a 2017 letter to The Daily Tar Heel, Trustee Alston Gardner strongly rejected the claim that Hurston had ever been a student. He plainly wrote, “of course, proving a secret is difficult, so I applied a reasonableness test and the case for Hurston came up short” (Gardner 2017). If one does not verify primary sources, this argument seems sound. It is true that Hurston was never officially enrolled and her engagement with UNC was brief. But to prove a “secret,” more careful consultation with archival sources must be considered. For example, the archival materials I consulted mention her participation in a class and her inclusion on a roster in The Daily Tar Heel. Moreover, as shown in newspaper announcements about her activities, it is clear that she had a robust, academic relationship with UNC theater and the faculty of the Dramatic Art Department.
Here, I want to highlight the forms of bias evident in the decision against renaming this building after Hurston. In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that official records and narratives fall short in every context involving historically excluded individuals and/or groups (1995). Further, erasure can come with explicit intent, but can also be achieved through institutional disorganization and biased orientations around what is or is not worth finding out. His words ring true here. First, the proceedings around renaming this building were drawn out and messy, a frustration that has been echoed by students and campus officials alike (Babatunde 2018). Some Trustees even maintained that they were never informed of the option to name the building after Hurston (Gardner 2017). Second, the opaque criteria around what is or is not reasonable—a “reasonableness test”—are clearly not objective measures, but epistemological creations. Even when primary sources point in a different direction, the types of information favored by the institution reinforce this bias, continuing to leave Hurston off the record. All these issues converge into a broad disregard for Hurston in the process of renaming the Saunders building.
The silencing logics that Trouillot gestures towards crippled UNC’s institutional recognition of Hurston’s legacy, even in spite of support across campus for her name to be used. By this measure, certain stories within the academy are legitimized while others remain clandestine, a secret, or just simply disappear. As a result, the effects of twentieth-century segregation are perpetuated today, as historical knowledge continues to form and shape contemporary institutional decisions. This continuity is evident in the scrutiny UNC placed on Hurston’s history, which replicated the very same denial of her presence in the past. UNC was unable to formally accommodate Hurston in 1939, so as she did often in her life, she satiated her curiosity beyond the official bounds of the institution. This ingenuity and desire to learn should be celebrated as an academic virtue. Instead, UNC has continued to overlook her.
Institutionally, UNC suggests that to prove such a secret is an unreasonable demand. However, this is not a valid reason to continue to marginalize Hurston. Even posthumously, the university held Hurston to an insurmountable burden of proof, employing her exclusion from the official sphere of academic life as the basis to continue to exclude her 75 years later. And this issue does not just apply to Hurston. Many innovative, multidisciplinary Black scholars (Durham native and legal scholar Pauli Murray, anthropologist Vera Mae Green, and cultural critic Sylvia Wynter, to name a few) encounter similar assemblages of erasure, which stretch across time to attempt to enclose them firmly within the boundaries of the reasonable—a conceptual space that makes no effort to remedy the violence of the archive, as Trouillot describes it (1995).
The peripatetic nature of Hurston’s life, as well as the relative recency of her emergence into the mainstream, leaves us to create the biography of a woman thought to be “unpredictable [and] unfathomable” (Howard 1980, 175). The dynamic, unsanctioned, creative nature of her life should be a point of pride, not a justification for erasure. These forms of erasure can and should be considered by anthropologists, who are uniquely suited to identify and understand such concerns. Anthropologists are trained to notice the cultural and epistemological particularities taken for granted as the way it is and the way it was. As anthropologists, we can claim Hurston as one of our own and speak to the complexity of her life, both on and off the historical record. Our tolerance for relativity and ambiguity is greater than most. We can meet the record where it is and prioritize the commendation of those whose contributions have been overlooked. The history of anthropology has been marred by racism, anti-Blackness, and misogynoir, but perhaps optimistically, I believe that anthropologists are also uniquely suited to identify and critique the cultural logics of race that still impact our institutions. This effort goes well beyond the naming of buildings.
The marginalization of figures like Hurston is indicative of a larger issue within academic institutions, one that demands a critical reexamination of who is honored and how their legacies are constructed and maintained. Our current moment, which reflects an unprecedented existential threat to the legacies of people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals, epitomizes why this reevaluation is necessary. The mass erasure of public resources and records has put what is at stake into harsh focus. The erosion of history and the increasing threat to the legacies of marginalized individuals underscores the importance of anthropologists’ roles in safeguarding and amplifying voices like Hurston’s. This work occurs within the discipline, of course, but the clear articulation of what this erasure is and what it does has become all the more urgent for a broader audience. As academic institutions bow to governmental authority, anthropologists have an obligation to openly criticize the logical fallacies that enable cultural and historical erasures—if not for the integrity of our scholarship, then to stop replicating the same mistakes as when we first shunned Hurston from this field.
Conflicts over the naming of buildings may seem trivial, especially for those of us who prefer to advocate for significant structural changes over what critics could call mere optics. However, the underlying logics that dictate how these decisions are made reflect deficits of an academic apparatus that will only continue to widen as marginalized groups face deleterious, politicized attacks to their own histories. In the face of the broader forces that seek to erase Black women from anthropology, history, and the very fabric of American culture, we must loudly ensure that Hurston does not disappear.
Works Cited
Babatunde, Omololu. 2018. “Omololu Babatunde on the invocation of Zora Neale Hurston Hall.” Interview by Charlotte Fryar. Reclaiming the University of the People, May 2, 2018. Audio, 04:25.
Boyd, Valerie. 2004. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner.
The Carolina Times. 1939. “N.C. College To Host Gathering of Colleges and Secondary Schools.” December 9, 1939.
The Chapel Hill Weekly. 1940. “Negro Writer to Speak Here.” January 19, 1940.
The Daily Tar Heel. 1939. “Drama Group Concludes Meet; Zora Neale Hurston Featured.” October 8, 1939.
______. 1939. “Hurston to Speak To Friendship Group On Negro Literature.” November 5, 1939.
______. 1939. “Miss Zona [sic] Hurston Addresses Freshmen on Negro Writing.” November 7, 1939.
______. 1939. “Carolina Arts Group Announces Winter Speakers.” December 10, 1939.
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______. 1940. “Weekly Radio Class Continually Seeking Recruits for Group.” February 25, 1940.
______. 1940. “Drama Festival Delegates Have Full Day Ahead.” April 5, 1940.
Durham County Library. n.d. “Dr. James E. Shepard, Founder of North Carolina Central University.” And Justice for All: Durham County Courthouse Art Wall. Accessed December 6, 2024.
Gardner, Alston. 2017. “Letter: DTH Yale editorial was misguided.” The Daily Tar Heel.
Hemenway, Robert. 1971. “Letter to Paul Green.” Paul Green Papers, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.
Herrera, Caleb. 2024. “Renaming process for Hamilton Hall to Pauli Murray Hall stalled.” The Daily Tar Heel, March 31, 2024.
Howard, Lillie P. 1980. “Conclusion.” In Zora Neale Hurston. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 381. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1939. “Letter to E.O. Grover.” Zora Neale Hurston Papers. George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
______. 1995. Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings. New York: Library of America.
The North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development. 2010. The Economic Impact of North Carolina Central University. Durham, NC: Historically Black Colleges and Universities Economic Series.
Spearman, Walter. 1970. The Carolina Playmakers: The First Fifty Years. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Svrluga, Susan. 2015. “UNC takes on its past, renaming hall that has long honored a KKK leader.” The Washington Post, May 28, 2015.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Walker, Alice. 1975. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms. Magazine, March 1975, 74-89. Alice Walker Papers. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
The University of North Carolina. 1939. Yackety Yack. North Carolina College and University Yearbooks, Digital NC
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Young, Dick. 1940. “Sunday Night Radio Group To Outline Spring Program.” The Daily Tar Heel, March 30, 1940.
This piece was edited by Tracie Canada and Bethany G. Anderson.
Notes
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