Team of Rivals

The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
 
by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Whether we like it or not, the United States of America would not exist without politics or politicians.  Our constitutionally defined representative democracy is one of the greatest achievements of civilization.  Unfortunately, what makes it great is also its greatest threat:  it is the responsibility of the people who live under the rule of laws written by elected representatives to maintain the integrity of those laws by participating in the making of them.  Our founders understood how fragile their new form of government would be because it relied on a majority of the  people to agree to play by the new set of rules in order that the country function as a sovereign entity.  The question of slavery dogged the founders, but they found a way to unify the nation by permitting certain southern states to continue the practice.  For the next 80 years, slavery became increasingly divisive as the country began expanding westward.  Slave states wanted the new territories to permit slavery.  Free states objected to any expansion of slavery, and a growing number of abolitionists felt that the practice was intolerable for a nation founded on the principal of liberty and justice for all.

Abraham Lincoln joined the pantheon of great American presidents by winning the Civil War and by ending slavery.  He became president in a way that seemed accidental, because he was the least known of the leading contenders for the presidency in 1860.  Moreover, he was a humble country lawyer, largely self-taught, and quite awkward-looking.  What he lacked in appearance and credentials he more than made up for in intelligence and political skill. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent book, Team of Rivals, explains in detail exactly how Abraham Lincoln used politics not only to get elected to the presidency, but also to end the practice of slavery in America.  While ponderous, the book is extremely well written and maintains the sense of urgency felt throughout the United States before, during, and after the Civil War.

In 1858, former U. S. Representative Abraham Lincoln, at the time a Whig, lost a senate challenge to incumbent Stephen A. Douglas after a series of debates highlighted growing divisions in the nation on the question of whether slave owners could move into newly established western territories.  Lincoln opposed the practice of slavery but recognized that the Constitution permitted it in certain states.  Senator Douglas, through a piece of legislation known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, undid the Missouri Compromise which set the northern boundary for slavery at parallel 36°30′ north (except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri).  Debate over this law emboldened the southern states because it allowed the settlers of the new territories to decide by majority vote whether or not to permit slavery.  The southern states’ agrarian economies depended on the industrialized cities of the northeast where political power was concentrated.  Both sides recognized that it had the potential to change the political balance of power in the United States by increasing the power of those who depended on slavery.  Meanwhile, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published in 1852), enlightened the public on the horrors of slavery, giving traction to the Abolitionist movement in the north and setting the stage for the Civil War. 

Two years after his failed Senate campaign, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln re-entered politics seeking the Republican nomination to the office of President.  The leading contenders – William H. Seward, Simon Cameron, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates – underestimated the “rail-splitter” from Illinois.  After three ballots Lincoln, through astute political maneuvering, honesty, and good manners emerged the nominee.  The presidential election results revealed how deeply divided north and south had become:  he won the northern states and western territories but not a single southern state.   His election to the presidency, with no constituents in the south, was the breaking point and eleven southern states – South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, in that order – seceded from the Union.  Shortly before Lincoln’s inauguration, Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America.  

Team of Rivals explains with great clarity the political brilliance of Abraham Lincoln.  He was elected president with less than 50 per cent of the vote; and to offset this vulnerability he brought several of his rivals for the office into his cabinet.  Not only did this lead to better debates, it helped him understand the will of the people from many perspectives.  Throughout his presidency, his rivals both underestimated and attempted to undermine him but he was always two steps ahead of them.  Rather than seek revenge, Lincoln found ways to defuse his opposition which allowed them to save face as he outmaneuvered them.  His first and most painful political lesson happened early on in the Civil War.

Despite superior manpower and war machinery, the Union fought a half-hearted battle to reclaim the wayward states.  This was largely due to the failure of General George McClellan to lead the army.  The Confederate soldiers, on the other hand, fought with passion and bested the Union troops in battle after battle.  It seemed possible that the unthinkable might happen until the deliberative president, with his considerable political skill, reorganized the army’s leadership and rallied the troops behind the cause of preserving the Union.  Lincoln, being a civilian, had to tread carefully among the military leaders in order to keep their loyalty.  It took time and many lives before he was able to remove McClellan from command and replace him with a general who was willing to fight.

As calls for ending slavery became louder in the north and conditions in battle grew worse, Lincoln issued the “Emancipation Proclamation” (1863) ordering the entire executive branch of the government, including the armed forces, to treat the slaves in the Confederate states as free people and used this as leverage to attempt to bring the Confederate states back to the Union.  The Proclamation’s sole purpose was to weaken the Confederacy, not to eradicate slavery from the nation because it did not apply to the five slave states which did not secede.  Lincoln knew that it would take an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery from the entire country.    

Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri, on January 11,1864, called for this constitutional amendment which quickly passed in the Senate.  The House of Representatives, however, failed to achieve the two-thirds majority vote required until the following year.  President Lincoln, again used his political skill to persuade just enough Representatives to support it while he simultaneously campaigned for re-election.  He won and shortly after his inauguration in January of 1965, the House passed the amendment by a vote of 119 to 56.  The northern states voted to ratify the 13^th amendment in short order, but before it became part of the Constitution, President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, as he watched a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.  Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency and pushed the Confederate states to return to the Union and ratify the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution.  In all, 27 of the (then) 36 states voted to ratify and slavery ended, freeing millions of black Americans from bondage, but not from hardship.

President Lincoln, shortly before his death, had advocated giving black men the right to vote.  Not everyone who opposed slavery and supported the 13^th Amendment agreed with this.  Many Abolitionists favored sending the freed slaves to Liberia in Africa where many previously freed slaves had settled beginning in 1820.  This might have appealed to those who had been captured and imported on slave ships, but the majority of slaves in the United States in the mid-1800s were born on American soil and were not inclined to leave the only home they knew.  Thus began a massive migration of freed slaves to the industrialized north which created an entirely new set of problems for the nation’s politicians to deal with for more than a century, in ways both ugly and beautiful, but never with the finesse of Abraham Lincoln.

Today’s politicians are an unpopular lot, and deservedly so, thanks to a political system mired in dysfunction.  Very few Americans seem satisfied with the work being done by the politicians we have elected to do the nation’s business because they are not doing very much that could be called work (and this has been true for far too long).  The so-called “Sequester” is the latest example of politics gone bad in America.  It’s draconian spending cuts and tax hikes were designed to be so heinous that neither political party would let it happen, but they did anyway.  Watching the Washington drama play out is like witnessing a toxic divorce:  the parties cannot even agree on the weather.  Once upon a time, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, could argue about policy, play a round of golf, and reach a consensus.  Gradually across the past thirty years politicians have stopped using good manners and have become focused on winning – the argument, the tactical maneuver, the debate, the election – by any means necessary.  Today, the American people are more cynical than at any point in our history, and this is a danger to our democracy.

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln closed with these words:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

This country may never again be blessed with a politician of Lincoln’s greatness, but that is no excuse for the mockery we, the people of the United States of America, are making of our miraculous form of government when we allow political organizations to turn us against each other over issues we ought to be able to talk about.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved  

Leaves of Grass

by Walt Whitman

“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.  The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” – Walt Whitman, from his introduction to Leaves of Grass.

It is during times of great social change that iconic artists, writers, and poets emerge whose works reflect and express the spirit of the times.  Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was one of these icons and his epic poem cycle, Leaves of Grass, describes a young nation attempting to define itself while reconciling the conflicts left unresolved at its inception.  Whitman was born at a time when slavery was ripping the United States of America into feuding camps:  abolitionists wanted slavery to end on purely moral grounds while slave states depended on the plantation economy in order to produce cash crops such as tobacco and cotton.  In the years leading up to the Civil War, friends and family members would often come to blows over the issue of slavery because there was no middle ground.  Either slaves were full humans and therefore entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” under the Constitution, or they were on a par with livestock, entitled to no rights whatsoever.  In the end, it would take the catharsis of war to settle the question, but the end of the war was the beginning of the social turbulence created when tens of thousands of freed slaves abandoned the plantations of their birth, with little more than the clothes on their backs, for the hope of paid work in the smokestack industries of the northeast.

As this drama unfolded, Walt Whitman’s inner world roiled as he watched, listened, and reported on the national argument.  The greatness of the United States came from the idea that we are a nation of laws, not of men, and that all men are created equal.  Only the most intellectually dishonest people could argue that slaves were not human beings, and while he himself did not favor slavery, Whitman did not fully embrace the Abolitionist movement, because he felt it was somehow antithetical to the American ideal.  Whitman recognized that slavery as a practice was dehumanizing; that even the most beaten down slave was still a man or woman in possession of a soul, capable of goodness and evil, and made of the same stuff as his or her master.  The question of slavery notwithstanding, Whitman understood that the American ideal transcended the lesser aspects of human nature, allowing our more noble character traits to define us:  a pure example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.  Slavery and the American ideal were incompatible, but the southern United States depended on slavery for their survival.  Whitman recognized that resolving this issue was going to be painful, perhaps ruinous.

Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, describes America and Americans in words the way a mixed media collage or abstract expressionist painting tells a story through visual imagery.  In the introduction to the poem cycle, Whitman writes that  “the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always most in the common people.”  Whitman himself was of modest origins and worked in journalism and publishing for most of his young life, taking time out to nurse Civil War soldiers before becoming a US government employee after the war ended.   He knew the meaning of work and was not afraid to get his hands dirty.  Whitman had little in the way of formal education, but had a high aptitude for the English language and became a writer at a young age.   In his early thirties, Whitman decided to become a poet and completed the first edition of the collection of poems which would establish him as one of America’s seminal literary figures.

Reading Leaves of Grass is a journey deep inside oneself.  Whitman’s struggle to make peace with ethical dilemmas, sexuality, religion, death and relationships is not unique:  it is something common to almost every human being, fortunate enough to live free from tyranny, who seeks a life with meaning.  His poems make another point which is that even though our constitution gives us freedom, we Americans do not always agree on what it means to be free.  Whitman received harsh criticism both for his free-form writing and for his treatment of sexuality in Leaves of Grass.  Some said it was immoral, pornographic, homoerotic, or all three.  Just the same, Whitman continued to revise and republish the work up until his death in 1892, and it remains a classic piece of American literature to this day.

I decided to read Leaves of Grass after finding my husband’s copy bookmarked by his terminally ill brother.  The first bookmark fell on a verse discussing immortality, the second on sleep – eternal and otherwise, the fourth on a verse about God, and the fifth about final judgment.  Clearly, my brother-in-law was preparing himself for the end and these poems were helpful to him.  So out of sympathy I read the first three verses of “Song of Myself” which begin as follows:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease….observing a spear of summer grass.

And I was hooked which surprised me because I have never enjoyed reading poetry.  As a child, I loved listening to poems and nursery rhymes with their song-like cadences and colorful phrases; the captivating blend of stories and songs set to verse.  One of my fondest memories is of my mother’s voice reverberating as I rested my head against her while she read from “The Family Book of Best Loved Poems” with her arm tucked around my shoulders, my little sister on her other side, and my baby brother on her lap.  If I could relive one moment of my childhood, it would be this.

The rhythmic poems I loved as a child are the product of a great tradition of spoken and –eventually –  written language.  Epic poems were how histories survived from generation to generation and across cultures.  Traveling orators committed poems to memory and earned a living by entertaining crowds while preserving histories until they could be written down.  The classic poems from pre-literate societies relied on  metered verses with repeating phrases and epithets to make them easier to memorize.  Some surviving examples of this spoken tradition include Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, and Virgil’s “Aeneid” in Greek; Vyasa’s “Mahābhārata” in Sanscrit; and “Beowulf” of unknown authorship in old English. 

Unlike his predecessors and most of his contemporaries, Walt Whitman crafted free-form verse which had a more emotional and expressive quality than cadenced rhyming verses.  Reading Leaves of Grass engages all the senses as if one is sharing Walt Whitman’s experience in the moment.  I can see why it appealed to my brother-in-law when he believed he was dying, still hoping for a miracle.  (Perhaps the poems have curative powers because not only did my brother-in-law survive his high risk surgery, but his body remains completely cancer free some three years later.)  It took me the better part of a month to read Leaves of Grass in its entirety, taking it a few verses at a time, but when I was finished I felt like I could appreciate the beauty of life more deeply than before.   Walt Whitman is considered a “transcendentalist” in that he sought greater and more profound truths than what we can sense and prove scientifically.  What this means is that he could see God in a single blade of grass.

Copyright 2011 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2009

What does America look like? The answer depends on whom you ask. Each of us has a personal vision of our country shaped by our families, communities, schools, churches, jobs, and cultural experiences. If, however, you ask this question of enough people from different socio-economic, demographic, and cultural groups, what emerges is a kaleidoscope of views. America is a single nation, yes, but it has people with many, and often opposing, opinions about who we are collectively. To some, that is troubling but to others our variety is what makes us a beacon of hope for the world, a place where everyone’s views may be expressed and, with hard work, anyone can succeed. Given this multi-faceted society, one might think that a young man with a Kenyan father and white, middle-class American mother would easily find a comfortable social niche. For Barack Obama, however, the opposite was true: figuring out where he belonged in the country of his birth was a long and often painful process.

The fact that he is President of the United States does not increase the importance of Mr. Obama’s memoir. Dreams from My Father explains young Barack Obama’s quest for identity and at the same time, provides insight into why black Americans, more than three decades after the end of segregation, still struggle to feel fully American. As a youth, Mr. Obama considered himself a black American and, while not embarrassed by having a white mother and grandparents at home, tried to fit in with “the brothers.” In one painful episode, Mr. Obama made fun of a fellow college student for “acting white” by studying hard and wearing argyle sweaters, only to be put in his place by his idol, Marcus, who said, “Seems to me we should be worrying about whether our own stuff’s together instead of passing judgment on how other folks are supposed to act.” A year later, writes Mr. Obama, that episode still upset him because he felt exposed as a fraud, but it did give him the insight that being black in America was about more than skin color. The fact that his father, Barack Obama Sr., was Kenyan didn’t mean that he shared the experience of people who had been abducted, abused, and despised for generations. Mr. Obama may have looked the part, but he was not and could not be a brother.

Rather than turn away or turn inward, Barack Obama decided to do something to right the wrongs left over from slavery and segregation, so he became a community organizer in Chicago, a racially divided city which had recently elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington. Mr. Obama’s description of the thought process that went into becoming a community organizer is sometimes humorous and often painful. Like so many idealistic young people, he wanted to change the world: change presidents, change the congress, change the hearts and minds of the people. That was about as detailed as it got. He saw himself as a leader, an agent of change, able to mobilize the grassroots. As badly as Mr. Obama wanted to be a hero to black Americans and lead them out of poverty and oppression, it was those same black Americans who taught him the hard way that his ideas, no matter how brilliant, were just that: his and not theirs. That humbling lesson could have discouraged or embittered a lesser man, but Mr. Obama’s temperament would not allow him to stay down for long. He learned from his mistakes, of which there were many, and tried again.

A big mistake was clinging to an idealized version of the Civil Rights movement. Barack Obama wanted, more than anything, to join the March on Washington, stage sit-ins, raise consciousness, and lift black Americans up. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, he was about twenty years too late. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the traditions which made up the fabric of the black American community were shredded, leaving a disillusioned, angry, dejected, and even self-hating population in its wake. In the name of “urban renewal” cities razed whole neighborhoods to build housing projects. Commercial development encroaching on residential areas also took a toll. Public schools in predominantly black areas, where community ties had been broken, deteriorated while at the same time, increasing numbers of teenagers became parents themselves. Meanwhile, drug use increased, providing a means for young black men and boys to earn money and led to bloodbaths in the streets. Black families fleeing the dangers of the city migrated to suburbs but were often greeted with hostility and waves of “white flight”. The community that Mr. Obama wanted to organize, it turned out, was in much worse shape than he had imagined.

After repeated failures to motivate citizens to challenge Chicago’s politicians, Mr. Obama learned that organizing with unions or creating job banks would not solve the more fundamental problem of teaching a high school dropout how to read or use a computer. Nor would these approaches provide safe child care for a sixteen-year-old mother so she could return to school, or after school supervision for children whose parents worked long hours. “In other words, it was different for black folks.” Pretending that the past is no longer relevant and that we have truly achieved racial equality denies reality. Having grown up outside of the black American experience, it took Mr. Obama a while to understand this.

Working within black churches, all that remained of black America’s cultural world, was problematic because the clergy were mostly interested in getting funding to keep their doors open and the heat on. Many congregants, having reached a degree of comfort in life, were not interested in fighting city hall. After several frustrating attempts to motivate parishioners at one church to demand needed repairs in their neighborhood, Will, one of Mr. Obama’s handful of loyal committee members suggested “taking it to the streets!” The problem, he explained, is that the people who most needed help didn’t necessarily go to that church and wouldn’t feel comfortable attending a meeting there. In spite of his skepticism, Mr. Obama helped Will print and distribute fliers announcing a meeting at a strategically located street corner. The appointed hour arrived and the “streets remained empty at first, the shades drawn down the rows of brick bungalows. Then, slowly, people began to emerge…” More than twenty people showed up, to the great surprise of Mr. Obama, ready to talk about long neglected potholes, missing stop signs, abandoned cars, and other problems the city should have fixed long before. At the end, Will said to Barack Obama, community organizer, “told you.”

Unless you tuned out the presidential election of 2008, you probably know the basic facts of Barack Obama’s adult life: that he was a star at Harvard Law School, that his community activism led to a career in local politics, that he ran for the Senate and won without the backing of the Democratic Party machine, that he wowed the Democratic National Convention in 2004, that he won the presidential primary against a field of formidable opponents, that he has an accomplished wife and two cute young daughters. Dreams from My Father provides the back story: who his parents were, what their young lives were like, how they met, why they divorced, and how each interacted with their son, Barack Obama Jr. In this book, Mr. Obama shares the experiences that shaped him: living in Indonesia with his mother’s second husband, being sent to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, his one and only meeting with his father, and connecting with his Kenyan half-sister following their father’s death. Even more interesting and poignant is Mr. Obama’s journey to Africa in search of hidden pieces of himself. During the presidential campaign, brief mentions were made of family in Kenya, but to understand who this man, the 44th President of the United States, is requires taking the time to read his memoirs. Even if he had never been elected to public office and remained an obscure figure, Barack Obama’s book would still be important.

Until reading Dreams from My Father I never understood why it was so hard for many black Americans to go along and get along with white Americans. Affirmative Action programs, while well-intended, only open doors. They do not cure the social ills which hold so many down and trap their children in the brutal cycle of poverty. Mr. Obama, with his multi-cultural upbringing didn’t learn to see the ideal human as having light skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and perfect teeth. The people in his world were multi-hued and of all shapes and sizes. Sort of like America. That he embraces our patchwork society, may be why Barack Obama won the presidency. That he loves this country in spite of the shameful episodes in our history is something we should all take to heart.

"Their Eyes were Watching God"

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Book Review by Teresa Friedlander (copyright 2007)

Books that challenge my views and beliefs earn a place on my required reading list, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, a beautiful work of fiction, is such a book. Growing up, I believed that I was “colorblind” and certainly tried to act that way. Reading this book helped me understand that racism is something we are all born with and must struggle against every day. With this work of masterful storytelling, Zora Neale Hurston opens a window into the history and culture of black Americans. After reading it, I felt a new appreciation for the creativity, courage, and spirituality that helped this nation’s slaves endure abuse, torture, and, after emancipation, abandonment by the only world they knew.

Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place in Georgia and Florida in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. After being freed, many former slaves were at loose ends and never emerged from poverty. Some of them, however, had the means and the knowledge to form towns and enjoy prosperity. Eatonville, Florida, (near Orlando) was one such town, and on August 15, 1887, became incorporated. Zora Neale Hurston’s father moved the family there in the early 1890s and was elected mayor for several terms. A keen observer of human behavior and recorder of speech, Ms. Hurston used her experience growing up in that town as the backdrop for her story of this time of great change for America’s newly freed slaves.

Janie, the main character, is a teenager being raised by her grandmother, a woman whose world view and beliefs were formed during her years of enslavement. Janie has an intuitive sense of the possibilities that life has to offer and yearns to find a way to live in harmony and happiness. Nanny, however, sees things differently. Out of a desperate need to protect young Janie and ensure her long-term security, Nanny arranges a marriage to a much older man with property and money. Janie is horrified but has no choice other than to submit. When the marriage becomes intolerable, Janie does the unthinkable: she runs off with a man who seems to offer the promise of romance and happiness that she craves.

Janie and Jody Starks travel to what will become Eatonville, Florida. When they arrive, it is clear that the settlers have no idea of how to form a town in a way that it will work to anyone’s benefit. Jody offers the vision and leadership which is sorely lacking and as a result becomes mayor. Janie, meanwhile, has married him and does his bidding by being well dressed and setting an example for the town. Behind closed doors, however, Jody can be a mean and abusive husband. Janie, like her slave ancestors, learns to take the abuse while protecting her heart and soul by not letting the hurt in. This is not to say she is meek, quite the contrary; when provoked, she has choice words for her husband.

After Jody’s death, Janie, now in her forties, meets a handsome, young stranger and the two fall in love. “Tea Cake” takes Janie away from Eatonville to the Glades just south of Lake Okeechobee. The two work as farm laborers and enjoy a lively social life until a deadly hurricane breaches the dikes holding back the lake. “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”. Thousands perish, but Janie and Tea Cake manage to survive the flood at a terrible cost.

As a story, this book could stand on its own, however, Ms. Hurston wrote the dialog in southern black dialect which gives it richness and authenticity. I found that I had to read the characters’ words slowly in order to translate the “Black English” into English. In so doing, I felt transported into a new world and was delighted by the clever word play she recorded and beautiful ways the author had of describing her characters’ lives. Savoring the dialog in this way broke through my preconceived belief that Black English was silly nonsense. Black English enabled the slaves to communicate amongst themselves and create their own subculture which white people could not and would not penetrate. It helped them survive the horrors of life in chains.

Their Eyes Were Watching God did not enjoy much success when first published because it was not a “political” book, in that Ms. Hurston was not publishing as a means of communicating a message about the wrongs of social injustice. Ms. Hurston did explore the topic of racism in its most insidious form: between African Americans. Janie becomes acquainted with a woman, Mrs. Turner, who is light skinned and says “Ah can’t stand black niggers. Ah don’t blame de white folks from hating’ ‘em ‘cause Ah can’t stand ‘em mahself”. She goes on to say “Ah got white folks’ features in mah face. Still and all Ah got tuh be lumped in wid all de rest. It ain’t fair”. Ms. Hurston likened this type of racism to “the pecking order in a chicken yard. Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t”. This was not a message that early civil rights philosophers and activists were willing to hear.

During her working life, Zora Neale Hurston made her home in New York City and was part of the “Harlem Renaissance” which more militant African Americans rejected as bourgeois. In spite of being a highly educated anthropologist, receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, and publishing a number of works, Ms. Hurston fell into obscurity. She returned to Florida in mid-life and worked as a maid until suffering a stroke in the late 1950s. This brilliant American writer died unknown and penniless a few years later and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Like many great artists, Zora Neale Hurston was ahead of her time and was unwilling to cater to popular culture. She wrote what was in her heart and mind and lived as a woman of free will. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, discovered Zora Neale Hurston’s work in the 1960s and endeavored to learn more about this gifted and largely unknown writer. It is thanks to her that Ms. Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as other works resurfaced to be enjoyed by scholars and readers of American fiction. Ms. Walker’s research enabled her to locate Ms. Hurston’s grave and in 1973, she placed a marker on it which reads “A genius of the South”. An understatement if you ask me.