Zora Neale Hurston Documents Black Southern Culture as Resistance to Erasure

Zora Neale Hurston, trained in anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia, conducted fieldwork collecting Black folklore, music, and oral traditions in the South in the early 1930s. Her 1935 collection 'Mules and Men' and her 1937 novel 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' documented Black Southern culture with unprecedented dignity and complexity, insisting on Black interior life against a white media landscape that denied it. Hurston worked on WPA Federal Writers' Project and challenged the assumption that Black culture had to be translated through white academic frameworks to be legitimate.