This new collection of writings from Black author, scholar and cultural critic Zora Neale Hurston will introduce her to a new generation and give her the honor due --- honor that was sometimes sparse in her lifetime --- for her brilliant observations and deeply considered opinions. 

Introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Genevieve West, both of whom diligently organized and annotated these 50 essays, YOU DON’T KNOW US NEGROES contains a small number of never-before published pieces, along with many that will be familiar to Hurston’s followers.

"Bringing Zora Neale Hurston to life again in this vibrant aggregation, Gates and West provide a laudable service to all of us."

Hurston was born in 1891 and lived to see the nascent era of civil rights, which included the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, the impetus for school integration. Considering this legal landmark, Hurston expressed the views that made her less than popular among liberal Blacks, as she always stressed the power of the individual over that of the state or the dominant race. In an essay entitled “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,” she insists that if there are adequate Black schools and they are supported adequately, then integration offers “nothing different than the presence of white people.”

The sole Black student at prestigious Barnard College, Hurston was a folklorist, ethnographer, cultural anthropologist and the author of four novels. She urged her fellow Blacks to rise up and above the prejudices and ill treatment they experienced. In “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” she recalls a visit to a physician “in New York instead of the South.” At the behest of her white benefactor after she returned from the Bahamas with a digestive illness, Hurston went to a swanky doctor’s office where she was shunted to a “waiting room” that bore a striking resemblance to a linen closet and given hasty, desultory treatment by the doctor.

Such vignettes, allied with Hurston’s refusal to accept white superiority, no matter how cleverly described by politicians and even those of her own race (such as members of the NAACP), make her strong will and character plain. Her writing deftly intertwined Black speech and the erudition of her academic studies, giving her words great motive power, as when she declared that, at times, “I have no race. I am me.”

Bringing Zora Neale Hurston to life again in this vibrant aggregation, Gates and West provide a laudable service to all of us. It is impossible to read Hurston’s words without recognizing not only her true genius but also her sincere embrace of her race, along with her love for her country and its best --- if not always best enacted --- ideals.