02/11/2025
🌿 **THE WOMAN WHO REFUSED TO BE SILENCED** 🌿
Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Eatonville, Florida— one of America’s first all-Black, self-governing towns.
No white oversight. No segregation. Just freedom, pride, and community. ✊🏽
She grew up surrounded by storytellers, dreamers, and doers — soaking in the rich rhythm of Black Southern speech that white America called “broken English.” But Zora? She called it music.🎶
She believed our folktales were art. Our dialect was poetry. Our joy was revolution.
🪶 She became a writer, an anthropologist, and the life of the Harlem Renaissance — walking into rooms like she owned the sun itself. ☀️
In 1937, she gave the world Their Eyes Were Watching God* — a story about a Black woman who refused to live small.
Critics mocked her. Publishers abandoned her. The world turned its back.
But she never stopped writing.
Never stopped believing our stories mattered. 💔
By 1959, Zora was living in a welfare home in Florida. Forgotten. Broke. Uncelebrated.
When she died in 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave.
No headstone.
No glory.
For 13 long years… silence. 🌾
Then came Alice Walker.✨
A young writer who’d read Zora’s words and felt her soul ignite.
Alice went searching — literally — through the weeds of a forgotten cemetery in Fort Pierce until she found Zora’s resting place.
She bought her a headstone and carved the truth into stone:
°“ZORA NEALE HURSTON
°A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH
°NOVELIST, FOLKLORIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST”
Alice Walker’s article *“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”* resurrected her legacy — and changed American literature forever. 📚
Today, Zora’s voice echoes in classrooms, in novels, in every Black woman who writes boldly and unapologetically.
She lives in every word that refuses to shrink.
💫 Zora walked so we could roar.💫
🖤📖🌺
