All-black Town Research Articles

“Wholesome Utility”: Patriarchy and Black Nationalism in Paradise

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between patriarchal culture and Black separatist politics in Toni Morrison’s Paradise . While these two themes are obviously central to the text, they are generally treated as merely contiguous elements of life in Ruby, Morrison’s fictional all-Black town. A close examination of classic Black nationalist discourse, however, reveals that the politics of Black separatism has, from the time of its origin, stemmed from efforts to establish a Black patriarchal order that could stand in opposition to racist institutions and practices that strip the Black man of the patriarchal status enjoyed by white men. I argue that Morrison’s novel exposes this causal relationship between patriarchal culture and Black separatism and the way that it generates within Black nationalist ideology a tendency to hijack, obscure, or even eliminate racial solidarity efforts that are more intersectional, inclusive, and democratic.

Freedmen Settlements of Indian Territory and Three Freedmen Community Clusters

Abstract: A lot of attention has been focused on the all-Black towns in Oklahoma established two decades after the Civil War. However, missing from the story of Black life on the frontier are overlooked Freedmen communities established earlier. These were not incorporated towns but were thriving communities where enslaved people in Indian Territory lived for generations. These small yet significant settlements of Black families did not voluntarily migrate to the West from the Deep South but accompanied their Indian slaveholders during the Trail of Tears. Many lived as enslaved people until the end of the Civil War. Afterward, they lived on the edge of incorporated white or Indian towns where they formed their own Freedmen settlements, established churches, built schools, and lived vibrant lives. This essay will focus on a few of these settlements, where footprints of their presence can still be found today in old “neighborhoods” that have been absorbed into other communities.

A Literary History of Josie Craig Berry and Her Communities, 1917–1955

Abstract: Black Americans settled in Oklahoma beginning in the 1830s; the first Black settlers were often people enslaved by Native nations. Despite the long-time Black presence in Oklahoma and the establishment of All-Black towns and thriving middle-class communities in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Ralph Ellison is the only Black writer publishing before 1940 who is commonly associated with the state. Yet Ellison’s science teacher and writing mentor, Josie Craig Berry, was a literary and journalistic powerhouse in Oklahoma City beginning in 1918. Berry published poetry, reported on cultural events, and wrote a weekly literary column for Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch newspaper from 1937 to 1939. This essay presents Berry as an accomplished poet, a literary critic, a community-based journalist, a public intellectual, and a woman whose contributions to Black literature and Oklahoma literature are immeasurable. Berry’s writings as examined in this essay also make evident the need for further research and academic publications on Black Oklahoma writers.

Steinbeck, Race, and Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract Despite its advocacy for tenant farmers, laborers, Okies, and other poor migrants across the United States, John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath seemingly ignores the Black Americans among them and effectively erases the history of African Americans even as it elevates Route 66 and the overlooked and forgotten trials and tribulations of White, rural, faming families who lived along it. This article surveys the state of scholarship on Steinbeck’s relation to racism and racial issues, and sets the novel’s depiction of African Americans in historical and well as critical contexts. In its bulk, the article examines one crucial historical fact that Steinbeck omits from his epic tale of the Joad family emigrating from Oklahoma: the many all-Black towns situated along Route 66 and its “tributary side roads” featured in the novel. Ultimately, readers of Steinbeck learn about the contexts that Steinbeck ignores but that nonetheless provide an opportunity to highlight with the fame he’s brought to the so-called “Mother Road.”

Editor’s Column: Summoning the “Honest Spirit” of John Steinbeck: Back to Ireland

Editor’s Column: Summoning the “Honest Spirit” of John Steinbeck: Back to Ireland

The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State by Russell Cobb

Reviewed by: The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State by Russell Cobb Matthew G. McCoy The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State. By Russell Cobb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 249. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-0998-6.) In this book, Russell Cobb examines the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of what it means to be an Oklahoman in the early twenty-first century. Born and raised in the state, Cobb is now a professor at the University of Alberta. He has also worked as a journalist, with his work appearing in various outlets including the New York Times and NPR. Cobb, a self-described liberal, sees Oklahoma as a state cursed with poor political leadership and a legacy of racism but home to a population that might be more progressive than elections would suggest. In the title, Cobb lays out what he sees as the original sin of Oklahoma's birth. The state was created from lands supposed to be granted in perpetuity to Indians. White land speculators connived to steal desirable land well into the twentieth century, leading to many notorious incidents, some of which Cobb discusses. From that tradition, Cobb argues, the modus operandi of Oklahoma's political and social leadership developed. "We do not like to talk about anything unpleasant," Cobb says of white Oklahomans (p. 102). Cobb writes that [End Page 428] growing up he never heard of the land thefts, the Tulsa Race Massacre, or even the origin of the term Sooner in his history classes. And even as these incidents have become more widely known, Cobb says that the tradition remains, with white Oklahomans preferring to fall back on religious platitudes or political posturing rather than confronting the state's problems. This is the ongoing swindle at the heart of his argument. Cobb spends an entire chapter describing Oklahoma as a "failing state" (p. 27). He points to the collapse of a variety of basic government services to support his claim. And yet, Cobb argues, many Oklahomans like to blame the government for their problems instead of tax cuts that reduce revenues. Cobb's mother refused to seek public assistance when he was growing up. He concludes, "Antigovernment ideology is so rooted into the consciousness [in Oklahoma], it does not even register as ideology" (p. 38). But the author sees hope for the future. He mentions widespread support for teachers in the aftermath of their walkout in the spring of 2018, even among Republicans. Passage of a medical marijuana law and some criminal justice reforms indicate that the pendulum may be swinging back toward the center. Cobb naturally approaches the project as a work of cathartic reportage, meaning that historians of Oklahoma, or the South in general, will find little new in the book. He almost exclusively cites recent journalistic sources, which is understandable given his purpose, but more references to key works of Oklahoma historiography would add greater context. Moreover, Cobb spends much of his time discussing Tulsa specifically, with less attention given to other parts of the state. Oklahoma City, for instance, plays little part in his examination. When the author discusses the history of Jewish communities throughout the state or the all-Black towns that once existed, his work is most impactful. His discussion of the mixed-race complexities of Oklahoma, a "mestizo state," as he calls it, is also valuable (p. 125). Breaking away from Tulsa to explain these other areas strengthens his argument. Ultimately, the book is both critical and confessional. Cobb makes clear in his writing that he is searching for reasons to explain Oklahoma's contradictions, in particular to his liberal acquaintances who seem baffled by the state. But he also wants to come to terms with his own upbringing and experiences. "[D]isavowing the Great Oklahoma Swindle can result in a new way forward," he writes, both for himself personally and for the people of his home state (p. 234). Matthew G. McCoy University of Arkansas–Fort Smith Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Black Capitalism in One City

Black Capitalism in One City Adolph Reed Jr. (bio) Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia by Thomas Healy Metropolitan Books, 2021, 448 pp. Thomas Healy’s book is an earnest and empathetic examination of Soul City, former civil rights lawyer and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality Floyd McKissick’s 1970s idea for a black-designed, black-led town in Warren County, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. The book is a moving account of McKissick’s commitment to his vision and the many obstacles, reasonable and unreasonable, objective and arbitrary, that hindered its realization. As a story of McKissick the man and his nearly indefatigable zeal, Soul City is nuanced and subtle, and it provides poignant, if not always fully intentional, commentary on the limitations of the political moment out of which McKissick’s idea emerged. Healy [End Page 151] seems to channel McKissick’s own enthusiasm in asking, “How could a project that once held such promise and potential fall so depressingly short of its goals?” His follow up questions suggest his answer: “Was Soul City an impossible and misbegotten dream from the beginning, or was it a brilliant idea that was thwarted by racism and ignorance? And how might history have been different if Soul City had succeeded?” I confess that I was bemused on reading those questions, especially the last. As someone who had peripheral associations with the project and was around it from nearly the beginning to the end, I never once believed that Soul City could be anything more than a boondoggle, much less a game-changing intervention in black American politics. I assisted in a shopping habits and patterns study that the Ford Foundation– funded community development agency I worked for in Durham conducted for Soul City in the early 1970s. Later, in the summer of 1974, I worked in Warrenton, the seat of Warren County, for six weeks on a research project monitoring local spending patterns of federal revenue sharing and other funds, which provided another perspective on Soul City. Occasionally, while visiting friends in Warrenton into the early 1980s, I would nose around and get updates on how little actual new development there had been at the Soul City site. Finally, during a car trip in late 2006 or early 2007, I pulled off I-85 on a lark to see what remained of the location. I was taken aback when I encountered a medium-security prison, which Healy describes in the book, and a factory under construction across the street, which was clearly being built to accommodate use of prison labor. That seemed like ignominious punctuation to the demise of McKissick’s vanity project, with its mixture of a class-skewed quixotic vision and blatant political opportunism. From that perspective, the more interesting question is what led Healy to see the Soul City experiment as having offered such promise. Perhaps his respect for McKissick encouraged a reflexive embrace of McKissick’s assessment of the scheme’s potential. Healy’s premise also comports with a romantic trope of recovering lost or forgotten roads tragically not taken, which has become conventional in a moment when boundaries between lay and professional historiography, and between writing about the past and doing politics, have dissolved under the pressure of claims to social relevance. The autodidact’s indictment—“Why didn’t ‘we’ (or at least I) know this?”—has elevated expressions of aggrievement above pursuit of understanding in approaches to black political history. This interpretive environment encourages extracting events, people, and tendencies from their contexts in the past to treat them as appendages to moralistic claims for the present. Healy contextualizes the Soul City experiment in some ways but not necessarily those that were most important. He situates McKissick’s idea in relation to an ideal variously characterized as black “self-determination,” “economic self-sufficiency,” “control over their own destiny,” or “economic parity.” In addition to discussing Soul City in relation to the broader New Communities movement in postwar metropolitan planning and development, he links McKissick’s ideal to the formation of all-black towns in the late nineteenth century and relates it to Booker T. Washington’s...

토니 모리슨의 『파라다이스』에 나타난 여성성의 윤리와 타자의 주이상스

This article analyzes Toni Morrison''s Paradise through Lacanian psychoanalytic lens to examine how the marginalized experience of a female community introduces an alternative vision to the totalitarian law in Ruby, an isolated all-black town. Despite its initial attempt to recreate an African American Utopia, Ruby is marked by its ultimate failure to move beyond racism since its ideal of paradise is actually built on the exclusion of different skin colors and gender identities. Meanwhile, it is the novel''s representation of a motley group of women living in a deserted convent that suggests a possible paradise regained. As the women search for their true femininity through affirming their bodily existence and singular way of enjoyment, they establish a unique culture that respects universal differences among individuals. I argue that their attempts to create an ethics of female desire are profoundly social and cannot be reduced to mere private morality as they offer a radical redefinition of “living together” against the masculine side that has often been associated with sexual differences of essentialism.

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Introduction

Introduction Kalenda Eaton (bio), Michael Johnson (bio), and Jeannette Eileen Jones (bio) Buck: Which way are you ridin', Preacher? The Preacher: Well, that's not exactly settled in my mind yet. Buck: Well, you got three possibilities. The Preacher: Oh? Buck: North, south or east. The Preacher: What happened to west? Buck: We're going west.1 The 1972 film Buck and the Preacher tells the story of black migrants leaving the south in search of economic opportunity, self-determination, safety, and black power in the American West. Buck's (Sidney Poitier) declaration to the Preacher (Harry Belafonte) that he and his travel companions were "going west" (and implying that the Preacher should not accompany them) reads as a declaration and a provocation. As the film reveals, formerly enslaved Blacks imagined the West as a place where they could cut ties with the Old South and their former owners, and with the aid of Native Americans, establish all-black towns where they could thrive and escape Jim Crow. Blacks would go west and challenge anyone who attempted to thwart them. As a "black power" western in the revisionist tradition, Buck and the Preacher tapped into an over 100-year tradition of black performances and representations of the Black West as a site of resistance and becoming. Black communities and individuals occupied, defined, imagined, and deployed the Black West to their own ends, ever mindful that their presence in the West provided counter-narratives to the mythic Wild West [End Page 5] replete with white cowboys, pioneers, gunslingers, homesteaders, sex workers, and marauding "savage" Indians. In doing so, they not only demanded that their presence be acknowledged in Western narratives, but also critiqued the dominant white framing of the West as a utopian space for rugged individuals and frontier democracy. The cultural work performed by Buck and the Preacher and other black westerns echoed that of novels, museums, plays, paintings, photographs, nonfiction texts, and other mediums dedicated to preserving histories and articulating visions of the Black West. In the academy, the study of the Black West has primarily included historians, many of whom are concerned with correcting narratives of Western settlement featuring cowboys, Indians, and intrepid "pioneers." Interest in black cowboys, "black Indians," black homesteaders, and the famed Buffalo Soldiers fueled historical scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Kenneth Wiggins Porter's The Negro on the American Frontier and William Loren Katz's The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History both appeared in 1971. A year earlier, the University of Nebraska's PBS station NET had released a four-part documentary series "The Black Frontier" that sought to place Blacks firmly in the histories of the West. Nell Irvin Painter's Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976) and Robert Athearn's In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-80 (1978) offered more critical analyses of black migration westward. Historians were not alone in paying attention to the black presence in the West in the 1970s, as the aforementioned Buck and the Preacher (a clear narrative break from John Ford's 1960 revisionist western Sergeant Rutledge) and several blaxploitation westerns—Soul Soldier (1970), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), and Boss Nigger (1974), to name a few—sought to place Blacks (primarily men) at the center of cinematic Westerns. Documentaries like Black Rodeo (1972), narrated by Woody Strode the star of Sergeant Rutledge, drew on black cowboy histories to explain the significance of the New York rodeo invitational. The 1990s became the most significant decade for literary production, particularly by Black women, in the genre of western historical fiction. Writers produced reinterpretations of historical spaces, geographic migrations, and the realities of social relationships in the "new" frontier. Examples include Pearl Cleage, Toni Morrison, Jewell Parker Rhodes and others who turned their attentions westward in an attempt to reconstruct prosperous and thriving communities destroyed by white capitalism, racism, and terror. Other authors like Octavia Butler frequently positioned the west as a platform for Afrofuturism and reimagined black power.2 During this same period scholars produced multiple critical histories of blacks in the West—that is, histories that did not focus solely on including Blacks in Western historiography, but rather...

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town by Marti Corn

Reviewed by: The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town by Marti Corn James M. Sorelle The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town. By Marti Corn. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. ix + 134 pp. Illustrations, resources, index. $40.00 cloth. For generations following the Civil War, the vast majority of black southerners were bound within a framework of dependency characterized by tenancy, sharecropping, and, as Douglas Blackmon has reminded us, "neo-slavery." At the same time, however, many freedmen and their descendants, cherishing dreams of economic self-sufficiency, readily embraced opportunities for landownership. Readers familiar with the research of historians Kenneth Hamilton, Thad Sitton, and James H. Conrad know that African Americans often were the agents of their own economic independence as they established all-black towns, colonies, and communities in Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond. In The Ground on Which I Stand, a volume in Texas A&M University Press's Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, documentary photographer Marti Corn introduces her readers to the residents of Tamina, a historically black settlement located in Montgomery County, Texas, ten miles south of Conroe and thirty miles north of Houston along the Interstate 45 corridor. Established in 1871 on acreage owned by a transplanted New Yorker who was willing to sell land to African Americans, Tamina (originally Tammany) was populated largely by freedmen drawn from various southern states to the logging industry and sawmills north of Houston. Here they built their homes, churches, a school, and a general store and developed a strong sense of community that persists among current residents, several of whom are descended from the first settlers. Marti Corn [End Page 119] discovered this community when she moved to Montgomery County in 1998 and has observed in recent years that Tamina's residents, embracing a sense of place and pride of heritage, have attempted to resist real estate developers from surrounding upscale communities who have threatened the future of the town. The Ground on Which I Stand is part ethnography, part oral history, and part photographic essay. Corn's seventy-four color photographs of the people and physical structures that comprise contemporary Tamina are the stars of the volume and help make up for a limited narrative line and long quotations from interviews with residents that in too many instances are less revealing than one would have hoped. While not always captioned, the photographs as a whole are stunning in their composition, simplicity, and, especially, in their ability to capture the dignity of the community's human subjects. Readers may reasonably question whether the story of Tamina belongs in a journal dedicated to the Great Plains, but specialists in African American and Texas history will benefit from this book as it explores from a new vantage point the continuing legacy of emancipation in the Lone Star State. James M. Sorelle Department of History Baylor University Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black RadicalismRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black RadicalismRadical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All-Black Town

Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All-Black Town

In the End is the Beginning: Toni Morrison's Post-Modern, Post-Ethical Vision ofParadise

Toni Morrison's Paradise presents the reader with two communities—the male-dominated all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, and the nearby all-female former Convent—at war with one another and with themselves. The patriarchs' insistence that their community's rich past provides everything they need forecloses the possibility of growth, change, and renewal; the Convent women eventually reject the past for a future rife with uncertainty but rich in possibility. The rising tensions between the two communities and the eventual violence that erupts dramatize the desirability but also the potentially disastrous consequences of holding too tightly to past traditions and ways of being and living.

Building a Better Place: Utopianism and the Revision of Community in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

This article examines the role of utopianism in Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise . It argues that, by juxtaposing the all-black town of Ruby with a group of women living in a nearby convent, Morrison revises traditional views of what constitutes the best type of community. She criticizes the idea of utopian perfection predicated on purity and exclusion and envisions an alternative community characterized by ongoing negotiation. Rejecting all utopian master narratives, Morrison projects a better place at a more human scale.

Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xviii, 304 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03420-6.)

In Black Maverick, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito reclaim the colorful but largely forgotten life of T. R. M. Howard as a way to assert “the importance of businesspeople and professionals as pioneers in the early civil rights movement” (pp. 76–77). Howard was born to a working-class family in Murray, Kentucky, in 1908 and caught the attention of a white patron who sponsored his medical training in California during the early 1930s. Howard wrote a column for the California Eagle, Los Angeles's premier black newspaper, and he served as president of the California Economic, Commercial, and Political League. Following his residency in St. Louis and a stint as the first African American medical director at the Riverside Sanitarium, in 1942 Howard accepted the position of chief surgeon at the Knights of Tabor Hospital in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Howard was a strong advocate of black business ownership, and he parlayed his connections into a series of profitable enterprises, including an insurance company, restaurant, hospital, farm, and construction company. In 1951 he helped co-found and lead the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (rcnl), Mississippi's leading civil rights organization throughout much of the decade. The rcnl mounted a popular boycott of white-owned gas stations, pressed for voting rights, and broke the credit freeze that segregationists had leveled against civil rights activists. Howard achieved national notoriety for his role in the Emmett Till murder case. When “massive resistance” swept Mississippi during the late 1950s, Howard moved his family to Chicago. Over the next two decades, he founded another health clinic, served as president of the National Medical Association, mounted an unsuccessful bid for Congress as a Republican, maintained a lucrative career with a black-owned medical products company, and worked secretly as a prominent pre-Roe v. Wade (1973) abortion provider. Throughout his life, Howard mentored a host of younger civil rights leaders, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, and Jesse Jackson.

“[J]us’ listenin’ tuh you”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Gospel Impulse

Don't care how good anybody could play harp, God would rather to hear guitar. That brought them back to Cake. How come he hit that box lick or two? Well, all right now, us know it. --Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God For, while tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph never new, always must be heard. --James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues night before hurricane in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, those who haven't left muck for higher ground gather at Janie and Cake's house for beans and sweet biscuits, stories about Big John de Conquer, rhymes, songs, dances, and games. highlight of evening dice, a show-off game, which continues until only two players remain: Tea Cake with his shy grin and Motor Boat with his face like little black cherubim just from church tower doing amazing things with anybody's dice (157). After emphasizing both skills of individual throwers and supreme entertainment value of spectacle, Hurston simply states, It was (158). This scene exemplifies Hurston's art as well. Earlier in novel, when Janie readies herself to tell her friend Pheoby where she's been for past year and half, she says, [T]ain't no use In me telling you somethin' unless Ah give you de to go 'long wid it (9). That understandin' history both personal and shared, history that engendered rich expressive traditions--music, dance, tales, games--inseparable from Janie's telling. Hurston tries, like Cake with his guitar, to make us know it in Their Eyes Were Watching God by telling, singing, and dramatizing Janie's story. And like Pheoby, who held her tongue for long time but couldn't help moving her feet (8), we readers must listen and respond, actively participating in dynamic associated with African American musical traditions--call-and-response. Hurston suggests new understanding of call-and-response as literary dynamic by bringing gospel vision to slave narrative tradition in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Raised in Eatonville, Florida--an all-black town, incorporated in 1886--Hurston carried traditions of her father's Baptist church with her to New York where she sparred with Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and others over proper way to present spirituals. In his literary biography, Robert Hemenway--largely responsible for rediscovery of Hurston in 1970s--notes that Locke and Johnson shared common assumption in 1920s that spirituals lacked the formal discipline of (55). Hurston, on other hand, applauded talent of such artists as Paul Robeson but argued that those attending his concerts were hearing neo-spirituals, not spirituals. In an essay included in Nancy Cunard's (1935), Hurston defines genuine spirituals as Negro religious songs, sung by group, and group bent on expression of feelings and not on sound effects (223). She stresses that congregation is bound by no rules. No two times singing alike, so that we must consider rendition of song, not as final thing, but as mood (224). We can assume that Hurston's various productions of Great Day, her 1932 folklore musical, reflected her understanding of spirituals as unceasing variations around theme which was not always sorrowful (223). Hurston's fierce commitment to what we might call inspired performances suggests more complex understanding of ways in which African American musical forms--gospel, blues, and jazz--inform her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Richard Wright unintentionally identified connection between Their Eyes Were Watching God and blues in his 1937 review for New Masses. Titled Between Laughter and Tears, Wright's infamous dismissal of Hurston's novel precedes Ralph Ellison's famous definition of blues, included in his 1945 essay on Wright's autobiography, Black Boy: The blues an impulse to keep painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from near-tragic, near-comic lyricism (Ellison 78). …

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

A woman of enormous talent, remarkable drive, and rare intellectual prowess, Zora Neale Hurston published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, many short stories, and several articles and plays over career that spanned more than thirty years. Although she enjoyed some popularity during her lifetime, her greatest acclaim has come posthumously. All of her books were out of print when she died in poverty in 1960, but today nearly every black woman writer of significance -- including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker -- acknowledges Hurston as literary foremother. And her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, has become crucial part of the American literary canon. Yet, despite the recent renewed interest in Hurston's work, she remains, as friend and contemporary described her, a woman half in shadow.Wrapped in Rainbows -- the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in twenty-five years -- illuminates the complexities of an extraordinary life. Born in Alabama in 1891, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still toddler. In this close-knit community -- the first incorporated all-black town in America -- she spent pleasant childhood, happily imbibing the rich language and folk culture of the rural black South. When Hurston was still girl, her mother died, and her father's swift remarriage led to the family's dispersal. Hurston spent the next decade wandering in search of parental figures, working menial jobs, and charting her own course into adulthood. Reinventing herself at the age of twenty-six, she entered high school in Baltimore by claiming to be ten years younger -- fiction she would maintain throughout her life. Hurston went on to attend Howard University and Barnard College, and during this time launched her writing career in the midst of the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. In New York, she developed relationships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Fannie Hurst, and Carl Van Vechten. Hurston periodically left New York to travel the country (and the world) collecting black music, poetry, and literature -- becoming one of the most important folklore collectors of her time, as well as one of the most enduring writers of her century.Wrapped in Rainbows presents full picture of Hurston as both writer and woman, shedding new light on her public and private lives. Drawing on meticulous research and wealth of crucial information that has emerged over the past twenty years, Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston's thirst for the limelight, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, her mysterious relationship with Vodou, and her occasionally controversial political views. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston's work in her time but offers implications for our own.Featuring more than thirty-five black-and-white photographs -- including some that have never been published -- Wrapped in Rainbows is an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century.

Locating Paradise in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory

Locating Paradise in the Post–Civil Rights Era:Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory Richard L. Schur (bio) Home is not a little thing. Toni Morrison, Paradise This article attempts to "locate" Toni Morrison's Paradisein the post-civil rights era by identifying its place within contemporary discussions about African American culture and the civil rights movement's legacy. Paradise is but one instance of an ongoing conversation among critical race theorists about the possibility of social, cultural, and legal reform. In the twenty-eight-year period between the publication of The Bluest Eye (1970) and Paradise (1998), the civil rights movement declined as a contemporary social force. By the early 1980s, critical race theory emerged and began "uncover[ing] the ongoing dynamics of racialized power, and its embeddedness in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit, formal manifestation of racism" (Crenshaw et al. xxix). The 1990s brought groundbreaking books that developed critical race theory and blurred disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate how discursive spheres have been racialized, gendered, classed, and sexed (Bell, Delgado, Guinier, hooks and West, and Williams). Due to its engagement with critical race theory, Morrison's novel translates paradise from a universalized concept that transcends race, class, nation, and gender toward a smaller, more local, and more "manageable" version. Paradise exemplifies and contributes to these new discourses on race and otherness by narrating the complementary histories of an all-black town (named Ruby) in rural Oklahoma and the nearby [End Page 276] convent that became a refuge for young women. The stories ultimately come together at the conclusion of the civil rights movement when the men of Ruby attack the "Convent Women" to drive them off and/or kill them. Through these interwoven stories, Morrison describes how the idealization of whiteness haunts the Convent and Ruby (spaces seemingly free from racism and white people), and how racial identity is always gendered and gender identity always raced.1 By situating the novel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Morrison captures the shift from the civil rights movement to the post-civil rights era, in which the realities of racial integration and gender equality, as putative paradises, were first being examined. Morrison insists that there can be no simple escape from the effects of race, racism, gender, and sexism without some sort of decolonization. In Paradise, Morrison portrays how African Americans have houses, but not homes. Haven, this group's first settlement, and then Ruby fail to live up to their names because racist and sexist ideologies do not respect the borders established by the townspeople. These communities based on a utopian ideal are not homes because the racial ideologies that the inhabitants of Ruby sought to escape follow them within their hearts and minds. As in much of Morrison's work, racist ideologies transform "domestic" sites into racialized spaces due to the racism and sexism built into their foundations. Paradise thus testifies to the difficulties of building a real home within the racialized soil of the United States. In her nonfiction writings, Morrison has explored how an unspoken African American presence haunts American literature [End Page 277] ("Unspeakable Things" 210, 212). Thus the very foundation of Morrison's fiction, the discipline of literature, is marked by racialization. These racializations come to shape how scholars and students understand literary texts, including her own. Morrison has argued that "[f]or the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man" (Playing in the Dark 14-15). Her interrogation of literature's foundations suggests that perhaps other disciplinary tools, methods, and concerns may be useful in uncovering the effects of literature. To do justice to Paradise, students of Morrison must not use the tools of the literary tradition to limit the meaning of her work. While at work on Paradise, Morrison stated in a speech that "[i]n the novel I am now writing, I am trying first to enunciate and then eclipse the racial gaze altogether" ("Home" 9). In that same speech, she characterized her entire oeuvre as seeking a way "to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home" ("Home...

Hybridizing the "City upon a Hill" in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Drawing from contemporary debates about post-colonial identity, this article focuses on issues of national and individual identity-building as represented in Toni Morrison's novel Paradise (1998). Central to its argument is the idea that the novel offers a critique of essentialism and Manicheism, which are unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity. As Morrison delves into the origins both of the African American community of Ruby and of the female community of the Convent, the reader becomes aware of several key issues. First, the all-black town of Ruby constructs an image of itself as an earthly paradise as a consequence of its engagement with the foundational Puritan myths and rituals at the core of American identity. As a result, Ruby emerges as the City upon a Hill for its inhabitants, and its status as such is reinforced by the jeremiad