Conclusion

The Black Migration

Hurston was one of many black southerners at the turn of the century that had to leave the South in order to survive as an artist.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1891. At the time she was born, Eatonville had only existed for five years. Much like the description in Hurston's //Their Eyes Were Watching God,// Eatonville was the first incorporated all-black community in America. It was founded by a man named Joe Clarke, who was eventually elected mayor.

In 1925, Hurston had arrived in New York with the second great migration of black people from the South--the first migration had been after the Civil War. But after World War One, black southerners once again fled the decreasing opportunities of the Jim Crow South for the North. Large numbers of people, with a shared history and culture, settling in Harlem and on Chicago's South Side, soon created an impressive cultural and artistic renaissance. She left Howard University without graduating due to illness and financial difficulty. Once in New York, she became part of the Great Migration. This was the backdrop for the Harlem Renaissance, a period from 1919-1930, that produced a wave of ideas through art, literature, and music from blacks.

African-American culture was finding in the North a new freedom of self-expression. There was, on the one side, a large and dense population of black readers and, on the other, enough interest in the "exotic" character of African-American culture among white readers and publishers to support the work of black writers.

In conclusion, the topic of the Black Migration relates to Zora Neal Hurston's, //Their Eyes Were Watching//, since both the people of the Black Migration and Janie begin a movement in which they are both searching for identity. In //Their Eyes Were Watching God//, Janie moves from location to location in order to search for who she truly is as a person. The people in the black migration were also moving from the South in order to establish who they were by taking their jobs within the North. Therefore, it could viewed that this novel could be a symbolization of the 1930's black migration since they both share the common quest, a search for finding one's place within the world.