Historical Context | by Victoria

          During the 1900’s in the south, blacks and whites were segregated to the extremes. Louisiana had separate entrances, Oklahoma segregated telephone booths, Kentucky enforced separate schools, and no text book would be reissued or redistributed if it was used by a black. Two-thousand blacks were lynched by white mobs between 1884 and 1900. Some of them were burned alive, shot, or beaten to death. Jim Crow Laws denied private and public rights to all African Americans. Blacks weren’t allowed access to picnic areas, parks, beaches, and many hospitals. Thousands of blacks moved to the north to get away from the Jim Crow area.
          Nearly 100,000 blacks moved to Harlem, New York. During the 1920’s, Harlem was known for creativity in art and literature by blacks. This movement was known as the Harlem Renaissance. It was the political, artistic, and cultural birth of African Americans. In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston moved to Harlem. There she focused her writing on African American folktales and folk culture. She carefully studied stories, language, and culture of the blacks in the South. Hurston also portrayed women as strong and independent in her books. The nineteenth amendment, which gave women the right to vote, may have influenced her to show women this way. Despite her attempt to show the public about black, southern culture, Hurston was condemned by many for celebrating it in art and literature. In 1929, the crash on Wall Street and the Great Depression began to cease the Harlem Renaissance from continuing.
          Between 1914 through 1918, about one million blacks moved north due to many reasons. World War I began and white men who fought in the war left their jobs which needed to be filled. Also, soil erosion and competition from foreign markets led to poverty in the south, so many blacks moved north. Since many blacks were farmers, the boll weevil infestation of cotton fields forced sharecroppers and laborers to find replacement jobs. Their only hope was to move north. The Immigration Act of 1924 halted European immigrants from emerging to industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest, causing shortages of workers. Lastly, hundreds of thousands of black farmers had to move because the Great Mississippi flood of 1927 destroyed land and crop.
          Although most of Hurston’s fiction was published after the Harlem Renaissance, it can still be used as accurate information. As well as the information on African American culture and their language.