Hurston was a great Anerican.
She came up against political correctness back then. The leftist victocrats if the day hated her and apparently stopped this from being published.
“When Hurston tried to get Barracoon published in 1931, she couldn’t find a taker. There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. Walker is responsible for reintroducing the world to a forgotten Zora Neale Hurston, who’d died penniless and alone in 1960, in a 1975 Ms. magazine essay. As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.””
http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html
Interesting that Alice Walker was once a rational human being. For the past 30 years, at least, she has been a raving maniac supporter of Communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. Has signed or supported many communist organization causes from the CPUSA to the Workers World Party, etc.
Hurston seems to have stayed out of the ideology game and tried to be a good historian and writer. Kudos to her for being honest.
There’s an old Clark Gable civil war genre movie that weaves into the plot the fact that black African kings were slave traders: “BAND OF ANGELS”.
The reason Hurston could not get her book published was because she wrote it in Cudjoe’s own dialect. Even back then the elitists were offended and upset at that cultural African speak. So no one published her.