African Americans in Florida

Jim Crow Florida:

Views expressed by James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston

This paper will examine the lives and beliefs of James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston as well as exploring each of these individuals interpretation of class and gender in relation to race. This paper will answer the question as to whether their personal reflections of Jim Crow Florida were similar or different and how so.

Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, dramatist, folklorist, and anthropologist was born in, Eatonville Florida, on the day of the 7th, she "heard tell," of January in 1903. It is fairly certain that she was the fifth child born in a total of eight to her parents. That which Hurston, "heard tell" were her brothers different versions of her date of birth appearing to her that none of the brothers actually remembered exactly when she was actually born.

Her father, after her mother died, remarried and the young Zora Hurston was sent away to other family, here and there and finally to a school in Jacksonville. While in Jacksonville Hurston met "racial segregation" for the first time.

Eatonville historically remembered due to being the first Black Town to incorporate was a very small town comprised of nearly all blacks. Hurston reveals in her writing the diversity, as well as adversity experienced in daily life in the reality of lives experienced by African-Americans at the time in which she grew up.

James Weldon Johnson, black poet, musician and political activist expressed through his outlets of poetry, music and political activities. After having spent two summers in Georgia teaching black children he decided he would dedicate himself to bettering the African-American status. Johnson's beliefs, published by the NAACP were simply this:

will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its integrity against all the powers of hell."

The Jim Crow Laws: The Views of Johnson and Hurston

Hurston and Johnson were alive and interacting as black individuals during the time of "Jim Crow." "Jim Crow" was the name given to the so-called "rules" and "regulations" of blacks during that time period. Basically, Jim Crow made a caricature out of all individuals who were black regulating them to second-class citizen status. The Jim Crow laws gave legal right for the abuse, discrimination, assault, disregard for and even sometimes death of the black individual.

The summer of 1919 was referred to as the "red" summer because of the spilled blood of the dead due to the racial tensions that caused uprisings, multiple both mass and rural lynchings and even the burning alive of some black individuals. James Weldon Johnson wrote a "The Red Summer" in connection to that horrendous summer of death, lynchings and the evidence of ignorance expressed through racial hate. Jim Crow was contributing to the tensions between blacks and white individuals. "Jim Crow" was not a person but a set of rules and regulations that had been set for black behavior and black rights, that is restriction of black rights.

Hurstons' views of "Jim Crow" were quite different from those held by Johnson who strove each day to rise above them. Johnson dedicated his life to this struggle.

Hurston as it were, never believed there was a difference in potential or achievement linked to the limitations of Jim Crow. In an article in "World Telegram" Hurston stated that: "the Jim Crow system works." However, approximately a year later she stated in an article published in the "Negro Digest that she was "all for the repeal of every Jim Crow law in the nation here and now." Hurston dismissed the thought that the black children needed the white individual present with the black children to learn. She simply did not conceive of any possible handicap or limitation on the part of the black individual and particularly on the part of herself.