NOTE: I’m just beginning to learn about Black author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). While lionized by many today, she also has critics, literary, social and political.
Unlike many other prominent Black artists, Hurston was politically quite conservative, what could now be called an “Old Right” Republican. She has also been claimed by libertarians. Continue reading The Anti-Creed of Zora Neale Hurston
A new documentary, “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming Space,” focuses on Hurston’s work as one of the country’s first Black woman ethnographers and filmmakers
By DeNeen L. Brown — January 17, 2023
In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston, who would become one of the most influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance, rented a chrome-plated Chevrolet and hit the road, returning south to her hometown of Eatonville, Fla. She hoped to document the culture of Black men who swapped stories each evening on the porch of Joe Clark’s general store. Continue reading Zora Neale Hurston: Pioneering Anthropologist & Author
January 2022: was it sunrise for Democracy, or sunset?
We weren’t the only worried ones . . .
. . . In Washington, the Supremes were busy working up their new minority rule act, with a special interest in the coming midterm elections, and protecting their withering reputations from the “stench” of their “ethics free zone.”. . .
Meantime, I kept getting texts like these, a couple per week, plus phone calls, junk mails, etc.: they all claim to be individuals, but reporters have shown they are working for big real estate dealers, who pick up lots of small houses, turn them into rentals, jack up area rents, and sell stocks in the bundles. I suppose it’s legal, but it will push out lower-income folks and generally increase inequality. As for me, I’m not selling . . .
No wonder there were a lot of gloomy days . . .
But in early February, the first signs of spring were popping up . . . Yellow daffodils, and tiny red-faced henbit. Some folks say henbit is a weed, but I like it.
But the lift to the spirit that the dawn of spring usually brings was suddenly disrupted this year, by a move far to the east . . .
The shock of this horrible war has not yet worn off. It soon took me back to my old stamping grounds a protest vigil in Fayetteville NC.
From left: the Fair Wendy, Patrick O’Neill, this blogger, and Andrew Bryant.
Since then, I’ve been working to learn about Ukraine and the war’s background, and sharing my discoveries on the blog. And there’s more to come . . .
Yeah, finding out . . . .
Pulitzer Prize-winning national columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is retiring and wrote his final column Tuesday: “Time flew, didn’t it? Now, it’s time for me to fly off, too.”
Continue reading Leonard Pitts Retires from writing columns; will write books
The Living Remnant & Other Quaker Tales. By “KKK,” (Edith Florence O’Brien.) Published by Headley Brothers in UK, 1900.
A Friend came across this book and passed along a link. It’s a series of four related stories about a tightly-knit (i. e., very insular) British Quaker meeting community, in about 1875. The “tales” portray, in sequence: an old-fashioned courtship; the subsequent wedding; the final dissolution of a stubbornly backward-looking Quaker faction, fixated on a version of the faith that time has quietly but remorselessly passed by; and then closes with the prospect of possible renewal as well as change.
Continue reading Quaker Book Review: “The Living Remnant” Rides Again
