Zora Neale Hurston, fellow Floridian, fellow traveler

Zora Neale Hurston, fellow Floridian, fellow traveler, a woman well ahead of her time, yet timeless in the greater sense of living a full life in the face of a world that was constantly challenging.

Zora was the first African American student to graduate Barnard College (the women's college at Columbia University).  She was an anthropologist, a fellow student with Margaret Mead, and was a graduate student at Columbia University as well.  In addition to her formal studies, she was one of the leading writers of the "Harlem Renaissance."    

Many of her collected songs are available on iTunes.

Below is her essay about being Black in a White world.  It is both serious and tongue in cheek humor.  It is a fine example of how one very creative and intelligent woman was able to make an enjoyable life in the midst of complex and often difficult circumstances.  Below it are some quotes that are favorites of mine.  

I hope you enjoy Zora Neale Hurston's

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

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.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate post. Proscenium box for a born first nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy do?well I thank you? where you goin'?"  Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome to our state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse mela, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county, everybody's Zora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brownwarranted not to rub nor run.

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world.  I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line! " The Reconstruction said "Get set! " and the generation before said "Go!"   I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that 1 have paid through my ancestors for it.  No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult.  No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathens, follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww!  I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something, give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.


But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first water diamond, an empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant.  In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held, so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place, who knows?


"I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes."

"Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

"Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."

"Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it."

"Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food."

"I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death."
Zora Neale Hurston

I found this by Zola.  It feels a lot like my life.  I want it read at my funeral. 

Zora Neale Hurston –  I have lived in many ways

I’m not bloodthirsty and have no yearning for strife. If what they say is true that there must be this upset, why not make it cosmic? A lot of people would join in for the drama of it who would not be moved by guile.

I do not say that my conclusions about anything are true for the universe. But I have lived in many ways – sweet and bitter. And they feel right for me.

I have seen and heard.

I have sat in judgment upon the ways of others. In the voiceless quiet of the night, I’ve also called myself to judgment. I cannot have the joy of knowing that I always found a shining reflection of honor and wisdom in the mirror of my soul on those occasions.

I’ve given myself more harrowing pain than anyone else has ever been capable of giving me. No one else can inflict the hurt of faith unkempt. I’ve had the corroding inside at times of recognizing that I am a bundle of sham and tinsel, honest metal and sincerity, that cannot be untangled.

My dross has given my other parts great sorrow. But on the other hand, I’ve given myself the pleasure of sunrises blooming out of oceans and sunsets drenching, heaped up clouds.

  

 I have walked in storms with a crown of clouds above my head and then zigzag lightning playing through my fingers.

The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes. I’ve made friends with trees and veils.

I found out that my real home is in the water, that the Earth is only my stepmother. My old man, the sun, sired me out of the sea.

Like all mortals, I’ve been shaped by the chisel in the hand of chance, bulged out here by a sense of victory, shrunken there by a press of failure and the knowledge of unworthiness.

But it has given me – it has been given to me – to strive with life and to conquer the fear of death. I have been correlated to the worlds so that I know the indifference of the sun to human emotions.

I know that destruction and construction are but the faces of dame nature and that it is nothing to her if I choose to make personal tragedy out of her unbreakable laws.

So I ask of her few things. May I never do good consciously nor evil unconsciously. Let my evil be known to me in advance of my accent, my good when nature wills.

May I be granted a just mind and a timely death.

While I’m still far below the allotted span of time and notwithstanding, I feel that I have lived. I have the joy and the pain of strong friendships. I have served and been served.

 

 I made enemies of which I am not ashamed. I have been faithless. And then I have been faithful and steadfast until the blood ran down into my shoes. I have loved unselfishly with all the ardor of a strong heart. And I have hated with all the power of my soul.

What waits for me in the future? I do not know. I can not even imagine and I’m glad for that.

But already, I have touched the four corners of the horizon. For from heart searching, it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate make up the sum of life.  

James Tolbert the lawyer who pressed Hollywood on civil rights

My very good friend, Anita Tolbert, recently lost her father.   James Tolbert was the black man who pushed Hollywood and the Television industry to remember that black people are a full part of American life and should be included as such in the media.

Here is a reprint of his story from the Los Angeles Times, 5/12/2013
James Tolbert, attorney, visionary, civil rights leader.

In a Hollywood auditorium, James L. Tolbert tried to induce a room packed with broadcasting and advertising executives to essentially join the civil rights movement in 1963 by pointing out the obvious.

"We Negroes watch 'Bonanza' and buy Chevrolets. We watch 'Disney' on RCA sets," proclaimed Tolbert, an entertainment attorney who was speaking to the 125 invited guests in his role as president of the NAACP's Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch. "We buy all the advertised products, the same as you do."

Delivered weeks before the March on Washington, the speech pointed out the absence of African Americans on both sides of the camera. It marked the start of an NAACP campaign that pushed Hollywood and Madison Avenue for greater representation of black people on-screen and in craft unions.

The "March on Hollywood" would cause a gradual but meaningful transformation, according to historians, that resonates today.

"The work of James Tolbert was as pioneering as many other civil-rights advocates who are a well-known part of our history," Mary Ann Watson, author of the 1990 book "The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years," told The Times last week.

Tolbert, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease years ago, died April 22 at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital, his family said. He was 86.

"What Tolbert and other activists intuited was that entertainment is just as important as any other aspect of civil rights. The storytellers transmit the culture. If you have black people invisible in the main storytelling, that means they are invisible," said Watson, a professor of electronic media and film studies at Eastern Michigan University.

By 1960 Tolbert was an entertainment attorney with his own firm and soon a co-founder of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

As part of the campaign to integrate Hollywood, Tolbert pressured craft unions to "hire one Negro on every movie and television show," according to a 1963 edition of the Crisis, an NAACP publication.

The sitcom "Hazel" was singled out as a test case. A threatened boycott of show sponsor Ford Motor Co. was averted in fall 1963 when an African American production assistant for Columbia Pictures became a production liaison on the program, integrating the "lily-white" technical crew, Tolbert had said in The Times.

That same fall Tolbert told a gathering of the nation's largest ad agencies that their own apathy and prejudiced actions had led to the organization's demands, according to the 2008 book "Madison Avenue and the Color Line."

"No segment in America has done so much to make Negro Americans the invisible men as the advertising industry," Tolbert said as the NAACP urged agencies to employ more African American models and actors.

While advertisers were slower to change, the campaign resulted in tangible gains in union hiring of technicians in the entertainment industry. The NAACP's own 1964 survey showed that African Americans had held more than 80 roles in the most recent 35 films produced. Over the previous year, they also had appeared on television in almost 140 parts, Jet magazine reported that July.

The change was so apparent Watson called it "the civil-rights season."

"Tolbert was a true visionary, and the nation owes him a debt of gratitude," said Michelle D. Bernard, who is writing a book called "Moving America Toward Justice, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, 1963-2013."

He "will be remembered," she said, "as the man who brought the civil rights movement and the African American struggle for racial equality to Hollywood."

The middle of five children, James Lionel Tolbert was born Oct. 26, 1926, in New Orleans. His father, Albert Tolbert, was a chauffeur and his mother, the former Alice Young, hailed from a jazz family. Her brother, Lester Young, was a noted tenor saxophonist.

When he was 10, James was sent to Los Angeles with his older sister and brother to receive musical training from their grandfather, Willis Young, a jazz educator who schooled him on trumpet.

In 10th grade, Tolbert dropped out of high school because it was fashionable among his crowd, he later said. After serving in the Army from 1945 to 1947, he earned his high school equivalency degree.

He received a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1955 from what is now Cal State Los Angeles and attended Loyola Law School before graduating in 1959 from the now-defunct Van Norman Law School.

The law firm he established eventually became known as Tolbert, Wooden & Malone and endured for nearly 40 years. His clients included actor Redd Foxx, singers Lou Rawls and Della Reese, and trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison.

From 1988 to 1990, Tolbert was president of the San Fernando Valley Arts Council. He also served on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the board of the Southern California Rapid Transit District in the early 1990s.

While raising his family in the San Fernando Valley, the upbeat Tolbert hosted nightly "Jeopardy"-style quizzes at the dinner table and modeled a philosophy of giving.

His son, Tony, is a lawyer who credits the influence of both parents but especially his father for motivating him to move out of his Los Angeles home in 2011 and allow a series of struggling families to live there rent-free for a year.

"This is, in some way, an extension of his philosophy," Tony told The Times in December. "He was always willing to open up our home to someone in need."

Tolbert is survived by his wife of 57 years, Marie, and children Anita, Tony and Alicia, all of Los Angeles; sisters Martha Taylor of New Orleans and Esther Ford of Sacramento; and two grandchildren.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 50th Anniversary excerpts

 Thanks to Congressman Alan Grayson (D) of Orlando Florida for sharing this.

Booking photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tomorrow, May 19th, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." King was jailed for campaigning against racial segregation in Birmingham, in violation of an injunction against anyone "parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing." His letter was written on the margins of a newspaper, scraps of paper that another prisoner gave to him, and then a legal pad that his attorney left behind. It has been an inspiration to millions of people; I am one of them. Here are some excerpts: MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:... . I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.... We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff[ly] creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.... But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime---the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.... I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because the goal of America [is] freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.... One day the South will recognize its real heroes. There will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?... Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.