Historical Context- Joshua Jenson

In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God the author, Zora Neale Hurston, uses her novel to depict the harsh society of her time for her fellow African Americans. There are three main historical issues that Hurston integrates into the book. Racism, all black towns, and in some ways the Great Depression are all found in the book. The novel presents great examples of each of these by placing Janie into each of these situations.
Contrary to popular belief, racism toward African Americans did not stop at the end of the Civil War. It continued even after World War I, when black and white soldiers fought alongside each other. It was still a great struggle to find work, to find friends, and to find a good place to live for colored people especially in the southern states. Hurston gives a good example of this when Janie is forced to marry Logan. Her grandmother saw the struggles of the colored folks around her and did not want Janie to have to face the racist society around them.
We also see the racist attitude toward the colored folks when Tea Cake is travelling in the streets after the hurricane. He was forced to bury the dead by the two white men. If he had been a white man, he would probably have been put in charge of the black people working. Racism is also present in that the white people who were killed in the hurricane were buried in coffins while the colored people were buried in mass graves. Hurston’s two examples are great illustrations of the racism that was present in that period of time.
Another historical nugget that is present in the story is the all black town that Jody builds the store at. There were about fifty of these towns that were spread across the southern states during Hurston’s time. Most of these all-black towns were in Oklahoma. The main purpose of these towns was to get away from the racism and segregation that was rampant in the south. These towns did quite well, but as in the book, many of them lacked the proper leadership. These towns attracted hundreds of colored people who longed for a world where everyone had equal rights. Some of these towns became very dangerous for white people to enter because of the hatred built between the whites and blacks. Hurston grew up in one of these towns called Eatonville, Florida.
This book was written on the brink of the Great Depression. Although the novel does not contain very much about the unemployment of this time, it is present in between the lines. It was twice as hard for a black person to get a job because of racism. Unemployment caused many of the colored folks to appear lazy like Coker and Hicks. At the time Hurston wrote the book the unemployment rate was about fifteen to twenty-five percent in the south. This caused the blacks to travel to the places that had work like the farm Janie and Tea Cake worked at. The problem was that these jobs were depleting because of the boll weevils eating the plants, soil erosion, and growing foreign markets. Tea Cake and Janie stayed on the same farm because they did not want to travel hundreds of miles between farms like the others. Unemployment indirectly affected Janie’s decisions throughout the story.
Hurston captures the hardships of being colored during the early 1900’s. Janie has experiences with racism, the all-black towns, and unemployment throughout the story. Racism was by far the biggest problem, especially in Janie’s first marriage. The influences of Hurston’s time period on her book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, creates a very clear picture of what it would be to live like in that time period under her current circumstances.
P.S. I intend no racism in referring to people as colored, African-American, white, or black. I apologize for any discomfort these references may cause.