Hurston and Johnson on Black Identity in American Literature

Introduction: Two Visions of Black Identity

The experience of African-Americans in this country has always been wrought with intense complexity and struggle. Even after the Civil War destroyed the practice of slavery that kept Black Americans legally inferior to the rest of the nation, the experience of being Black in America proved most difficult. Some people embraced their heritage, as seen in Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," in which she acknowledges her differences as an African-American but refuses to let them define her. Others were not so fortunate, as seen in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in which the unnamed narrator rejects his African-American heritage to live as a white man, enjoying higher social status at the cost of his true identity.

Hurston's Embrace of African-American Heritage

Hurston's essay begins and ends with the idea that she is different, yet she views those differences in a positive light. It is through her encounters with white Americans that she first becomes fully conscious of herself as a colored woman. Although she understands herself as Black from an early age in her hometown, she is most completely exposed to what it means to be African-American when she leaves her small town — and the individual identity her community has always known her by. In her town, she is Zora, Black or not. Outside her town, she is an African-American seemingly without a name.

She understands that she is African-American and observes the differences between her condition and that of the white Americans she sees passing through her town. This does not unsettle her, however, and she embraces her heritage with confidence: "I AM COLORED but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief" (Hurston 1). This declaration reveals great strength of character, which develops further as she confronts the realities of being Black in the South. Rather than allow her condition to define her or place limitations on her life, she harbors no resentment: "BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes" (Hurston 1). Hurston sees herself as African-American and finds nothing diminishing in that fact.

Johnson's Narrator and the Shame of Racial Identity

The unnamed narrator in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man presents a strikingly different response. This narrator shows profound shame in the fact that he is Black. The story begins before he has any knowledge of his racial heritage, and upon discovering it he feels somehow diminished — negatively altered by the truth of his ancestry. He remembers the exact moment of learning he was Black, a circumstance quite unlike Hurston's gradual, community-embedded self-awareness: "And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from one world to another; for I did indeed pass into another world" (Johnson 11).

Having lived his early life as a white child, the narrator continues to live as a white man even after discovering his true racial background. Permitted to pass as white, he turns his back on his real heritage. His Blackness becomes a secret — something to be ashamed of and concealed: "I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions" (Johnson 2). This stands in sharp contrast to Hurston's open, affirmative self-identification and illustrates how differently two individuals could experience and internalize the same social reality.

Conclusion: Heritage, Passing, and the Road to Civil Rights

Both Hurston and Johnson illuminate the profound social and psychological weight of being Black in early twentieth-century America, yet they chart radically different paths in response to that weight. Hurston's affirmation of her identity and Johnson's narrator's painful concealment of his together reveal the full spectrum of experience available to African-Americans navigating a society that denied them full humanity. Read together, these works underscore both the personal cost of racial inequality and the historical urgency of the civil rights struggle that would follow.