Free Republic

Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States. ... In fact, they are only now being released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that comes out on May 8, 2018... he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the...

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a book that I treasure. I was introduced to it by my younger sister Jina — she had an early interest in African-American literature and introduced me to many of the authors I read as a teenager. I was 19 and a freshman at UCLA when I first read it. Zora Neale Hurston had a voice that really spoke to me: There was a freedom and independence that was embedded in the narrative. Starting my adult life, it was very formative to read of a heroine like Janie, who’s looking...

A pair of Harvard professors are resurrecting the work of an African-American writer so politically incorrect that she was virtually bypassed in the rush to inaugurate variations of black studies programs—Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. “She thought Reconstruction was a deplorable period, favored Booker T. Washington over W.E.B. Du Bois even decades after Washington’s death, and opposed the New Deal; in 1954 she also opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors write in The Chronicle Review. Carpio and Sollors are professors of English and African and African American...