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Zora Neale Hurston:“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
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Abstract
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) wrote in a time when racism had proven relentless and oppression undaunting. However, having been raised in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black town, she was guarded against many of the cruelties of racial strife. Hurston uses “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” as a vehicle to vividly describe her realization of what it meant to be Black in America.
Contents
- Chapter 1: Many Thousands Gone: Black Experiences in Colonial America
- Narratives of Estevanico el Negro in the Southwest
- Virginia’s Act XII: Negro Women’s Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother
- Virginia’s Act III: Baptism Does Not Exempt Slaves from Bondage
- “A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting”
- Maryland: An Act Concerning Negro Slaves
- Virginia: An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves
- Louisiana’s Code Noir
- James Oglethorpe: “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina”
- John Woolman: Some Considerations on Keeping Negroes
- Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz: The History of Louisiana
- Alexander Falconbridge: An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
- Venture Smith: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa
- Chapter 2:: In Hope of Liberty: African American Life in the Age of Revolution
- Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation
- Phillis Wheatley: “His Excellency General Washington”
- Petition of Prince Hall and Other African Americans to the Massachusetts General Court
- Pennsylvania: An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery
- “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George”
- Chapter 3:: Now Comes the Test: Race, Nation, and the Limits of Freedom in the Early Republic
- Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
- Richard Allen: “An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve the Practice”
- Prince Hall: “A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge”
- Ohio Black Code
- Letter of William C.C. Claiborne to James Madison
- Peter Williams Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”
- Laws of the Creek Nation
- Benjamin Latrobe: “New Orleans and Its People”
- Missouri Compromise
- Laws of the Cherokee Nation
- Zephaniah Kingsley: “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society”
- “Jim Crow”
- James Creecy: “Language, Dances, Etc. in New Orleans”
- John C. Calhoun: “Slavery a Positive Good”
- Victor Séjour: “The Mulatto”
- United States v. Amistad
- Salmon P. Chase: Reclamation of Fugitives from Service
- Oregon Exclusion Law
- Charles K. Whipple: “Slavery among the Cherokees and the Choctaws”
- Chapter 4:: There Is a River: Abolitionism and Black Protest in Antebellum America
- Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm: First Freedom’s Journal Editorial
- David Walker: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
- William Lloyd Garrison: First Liberator Editorial
- The Confessions of Nat Turner
- Lydia Maria Child: An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
- Henry Highland Garnet: “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”
- William Lloyd Garrison: “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States”
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- William Wells Brown: “Slavery As It Is”
- Frederick Douglass: First Editorial of the North Star
- Frederick Douglass: “Letter To My Old Master”
- Bureel W. Mann: Letter to the American Colonization Society
- Sojourner Truth: “Ain’t I a Woman?”
- Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself
- Frederick Douglass: “Fourth of July” Speech
- Martin Delany: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
- American Colonization Society: “Things Which Every Emigrant to Liberia Ought to Know”
- Solomon Northup: Twelve Years a Slave
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech for the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society
- H. Ford Douglas: “Independence Day”
- Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Chapter 5:: A Divided Nation: The Turbulent Fifties
- Compromise of 1850
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
- Dred Scott v. Sandford
- John S. Rock: “Whenever the Colored Man Is Elevated, It Will Be by His Own Exertions”
- William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown
- Wendell Phillips: “The Puritan Principle and John Brown”
- Virginia Slave Code
- Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry
- Chapter 6:: The Dawn of Freedom: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of a Nation
- W. L. Harris: Address to the Georgia General Assembly
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Frederick Douglass: “Men of Color, To Arms!”
- U.S. War Department General Order 143
- “An Ordinance to Organize and Establish Patrols for the Police of Slaves in the Parish of St. Landry”
- Arnold Bertonneau: “Every Man Should Stand Equal before the Law”
- James H. Payne: Letter about “Sister Penny”
- Thomas Morris Chester: Civil War Dispatches
- John Jones: “The Black Laws of Illinois: And a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed”
- William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15
- Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Convention of Colored Men: Address to the Loyal Citizens of the United States and to Congress
- Black Code of Mississippi
- Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks
- Wesley Norris: “Testimony of Wesley Norris”
- Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Henry McNeal Turner: Speech on His Expulsion from the Georgia Legislature
- Initiation Charge of the Ku Klux Klan
- Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
- Richard Harvey Cain: “All That We Ask Is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, and Equal Rights”
- Chapter 7: The Betrayal of the Negro: Black Accommodation and Black Protest in the Era of Jim Crow
- “The Largest Colored Colony in America”
- Frederick Douglass: “Our National Capital” Lecture
- Report of the Minority, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States
- Pace v. Alabama
- Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1883
- Lucy Parsons: “The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher”
- Anna Julia Cooper: “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race”
- George Washington Williams: Open Letter to King Leopold on the Congo
- John L. Moore: “In the Lion’s Mouth”
- Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women”
- Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Strivings of the Negro People”
- Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women”
- H. T. Johnson: “The Black Man’s Burden”
- James W. Poe: “The Slaughter in the Philippines and Its Relation to Massacres of Our People in the South”
- John W. Galloway: Black Soldier’s Letter from the Philippines
- James Weldon Johnson: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
- George H. White: Farewell Address to Congress
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Parting of the Ways”
- Ida B. Wells: “Booker T. Washington and His Critics”
- Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles
- Kelly Miller: “The Economic Handicap of the Negro in the North”
- Booker T. Washington: Letter to William Howard Taft
- Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”
- Arthur A. Schomburg: “Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges, etc.”
- Monroe Trotter: Protest to Woodrow Wilson
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant
- “A Memorial to the Atlanta, Georgia, Board of Education”
- Chapter 8: If We Must Die: World War I and the New Negro Renaissance
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Migration of Negroes”
- Robert Russa Moton: “The American Negro and the World War”
- “The Colored Americans in France”
- “Africa and the World Democracy”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Returning Soldiers”
- Claude McKay: “If We Must Die”
- “How to Stop Lynching”
- “The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report”
- “The Riot at Longview, Texas”
- William Pickens: “The Woman Voter Hits the Color Line”
- Cyril Briggs: Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood
- Walter F. White: “Election Day in Florida”
- William Pickens: “Lynching and Debt Slavery”
- Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
- “To the World” (Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress)
- Jessie Redmon Fauset: “Some Notes on Color”
- Marcus Garvey: “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association”
- Claude McKay: “Soviet Russia and the Negro”
- Horace Mann Bond: “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda”
- Eric D. Walrond: “Imperator Africanus—Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?”
- Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”
- James Weldon Johnson: “Harlem: The Culture Capital”
- Marita O. Bonner: “On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored”
- Helene Johnson: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
- Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson: “The Negro Woman and the Ballot”
- Zora Neale Hurston: “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
- James Weldon Johnson: “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist”
- Manhattan Medical Society: “Equal Opportunity: No More, No Less!”
- Carter G. Woodson: “The Miseducation of the Negro”
- Buck Colbert Franklin: “The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims”
- Sterling Brown: “Ma Rainey”
- Chapter 9: Making a New Deal: African Americans, Organized Labor, and Shifting Political Alliances
- Elmer A. Carter: “Communism and the Negro Tenant Farmer”
- “Appeal of the Scottsboro Mothers”
- Cyril Briggs: “War in the East”
- William Patterson: “Manifesto to the Negro People”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “Marxism and the Negro Problem”
- Letter from Benjamin J. Davis to Samuel Leibowitz
- Robert Clifton Weaver: “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts”
- Walter F. White: “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”
- African Americans’ New Deal Letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt
- John Henry: “Landlord, What in the Heaven Is the Matter with You?”
- Richard Wright: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”
- Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”
- Folk Music of the United States, Album III: Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads
- Chapter 10: Double V: African Americans, World War II, and the Cold War
- A. Philip Randolph: “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”
- Bayard Rustin: “The Negro and Nonviolence”
- National War Labor Board: Case No. 771 in the Matter of Southport Petroleum Company (Texas City, Texas) and Oil Workers’ International Union
- Richard Wright: “The White Problem in the United States”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: “An Appeal to the World”
- To Secure These Rights
- Charles Hamilton Houston: Petition in Hurd v. Hodge
- Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted”
- Civil Rights Congress: “We Charge Genocide”
- Paul Robeson: “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China”
- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: Speech on Civil Rights
- James W. May and William Gordon: “What I Tell My Child about Color”
- Bayard Rustin: Montgomery Diary
- The Southern Manifesto (Declaration of Constitutional Principles)
- Paul Robeson: Testimony before HUAC
- George McMillan: “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain”
- Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”
- Charles C. Diggs Jr.: “Indifferent—or Irresponsible? U.S. Policy on Africa”
- Chapter 11: From Montgomery to Selma: The Modern Civil Rights Movement
- “Negroes’ Most Urgent Needs”
- Ella Baker: “Bigger than a Hamburger”
- George McMillan: “Mr. Local Custom Must Die”
- Jesús Colón: “Greetings from Washington” (from A Puerto Rican in New York)
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
- March on Washington Organizing Manual No. 2
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
- Malcolm X: “Message to the Grass Roots”
- Malcolm X: “The Ballot or the Bullet”
- Fannie Lou Hamer: Testimony at the Democratic National Convention
- Moynihan Report
- Martin Luther King Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”
- Loving v. Virginia
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power”
- Kerner Commission Report
- Ella Baker: “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle”
- Ella Baker: “Developing Community Leadership”
- Interview with Gussie Nesbitt
- Jo Ann Gibson Robinson: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
- Chapter 12: Say It Loud: Black Power and the Search for a New Radical Paradigm
- Carlos Cooks: “Hair Conking; Buy Black”
- Black Panther Party: “What We Want, What We Believe”
- Stokely Carmichael: “Black Power”
- Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles)
- Piri Thomas: “Brothers Under the Skin” (from Down These Mean Streets)
- Hoyt Fuller: “Towards a Black Aesthetic”
- “Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism”
- “Mboya’s Rebuttal”
- Eldridge Cleaver: “Education and Revolution”
- Jesse Owens: Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man
- Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement
- Angela Davis: “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation”
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Black Power and the Future of Black America”
- Ishmael Reed: “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”
- FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad
- Chapter 13: From the Bullet to the Ballot: Black Politics in the Post–Civil Rights Decade
- National Black Political Convention: Gary Declaration
- Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel
- Time: “Cities: New Men for Detroit and Atlanta”
- Shirley Chisholm: “The Black Woman in Contemporary America”
- Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
- Thurgood Marshall: Equality Speech
- U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: “Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination”
- Chapter 14: “I Rise”: Black Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality
- “Combahee River Collective Statement”
- Audre Lorde: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
- Melvin Boozer: Address to the Democratic National Convention
- Cheryl Clarke: “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community”
- Clarence M. Pendleton Jr.: “Comparable Worth Is Not Pay Equity: Looney Tunes and the Tooth Fairy”
- Joseph Beam: “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart”
- June Jordan: “A New Politics of Sexuality”
- Chapter 15: A Different World: African American Life and Politics at the End of the Millennium
- Jesse Jackson: Democratic National Convention Keynote Address
- Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission Report
- Jesse Jackson: “The Struggle Continues”
- John Conyers: H.R.3745: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act
- Anita Hill: Opening Statement at the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Clarence Thomas
- “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves”
- A. Leon Higginbotham: “An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague”
- Barbara Jordan: “Change: From What to What?”
- The African American Clergy’s Declaration of War on HIV/AIDS
- Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University
- Louis Farrakhan: Million Man March Pledge
- Cornel West: “The Black Church Beyond Homophobia”
- One America in the 21st Century
- Clarence Thomas: Concurrence/Dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger
- Jesse Jackson: “The Fight for Civil Rights Continues”
- Chapter 16: From Katrina to Obama and Beyond
- Congressional Report on the Response to Hurricane Katrina
- Adolph L. Reed Jr.: “When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina”
- Barack Obama: “A More Perfect Union”
- Barack Obama: First Inaugural Address
- U.S. Senate Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement and Racial Segregation of African Americans
- Barack Obama: Address to the NAACP Centennial Convention
- Tamara Winfrey Harris: “All Hail the Queen?”
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Dissent in Shelby County v. Holder
- Alicia Garza: “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
- “Movement for Black Lives”: Vision for Black Lives Preamble
- Barack Obama: Farewell Address