07/17/2026
The Truth About Zora Neale Hurston: Put Some Respect on Her Name
By Root Doctor Kye
For those who don’t like to read the voice over of this blog is linked here:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTSwGVHod/
It has bonus information throughout the video. 🫶🏾
Every few months someone gets onlineand decides they know enough to judge one of our ancestors. This is not the first time I’ve seen someone call Zora Neale Hurston a sellout because she documented Hoodoo. They have been saying this for years. Even before she died. That statement leaves out the historical conditions she was living in and the reason she dedicated so much of her life to preserving Black history, Black folklore, and Black spiritual traditions. Before judging her work, it is important to understand what was happening to Hoodoo during her lifetime.
By the early twentieth century, Hoodoo had already experienced generations of suppression. Black spiritual traditions had been criminalized, misunderstood, ridiculed, and rewritten by people outside of the communities that created them. White scholars, journalists, missionaries, tourists, businesses, and researchers were already documenting Black life, usually through their own interpretations. The question was no longer whether Hoodoo would be written about. The question was whether FUTURE generations would inherit a history told by the people who actually lived the tradition or by people observing it from the outside.
The main point people frequently bring up is that Zora Neale Hurston received financial support from a white benefactor to help fund portions of her fieldwork. That fact is historically true, but it is also important to place it within the realities of the time. During the Jim Crow era, opportunities for Black scholars, especially Black women, were severely limited. Research grants, universities, publishing houses, and major financial institutions were overwhelmingly controlled by white Americans. Accessing those resources did not automatically mean surrendering ownership of her work or abandoning her community. Like many Black intellectuals of her generation, Hurston had to navigate systems that were never built for her while still preserving the history and voices of her own people. Rather than focusing only on who helped finance portions of her research, it is equally important to examine what she chose to document (and what she didn’t 😉… REAL Hoodoos know), whose voices she preserved, and the legacy that work left behind.
Zora Neale Hurston devoted her career to making sure Black people remained part of that historical record. As a trained anthropologist and folklorist, she traveled throughout the South collecting stories, songs, language, medicine, folklore, and spiritual traditions directly from the people who carried them. Rather than allowing others to define our communities, she documented our voices, our language, and our understanding of our own traditions.
One of the clearest examples appears in Hoodoo in America, where she wrote:
“His own name for his practices is hoodoo.”
Although the sentence is brief, its historical significance is substantial. Instead of allowing outside terminology to define the tradition, she recorded the name practitioners themselves used. Preserving the language of a people also preserves their identity, because names carry history, culture, and community memory. By placing the word Hoodoo into the academic record through the voices of practitioners, she ensured that our own terminology became part of the historical archive.
Her work also documented an important distinction that continues to be misunderstood today. In Mules and Men, she recorded Hoodoo practitioner Luke Turner explaining:
“Hoodoo is private… The white people look on, and think they see all, when they only see a dance.”
This passage explains the difference between public visibility and spiritual access. Throughout history, portions of Hoodoo could be observed publicly through community gatherings, celebrations, music, consultations, and other cultural expressions. However, observation has never been the same as participation. Outsiders could witness an event without understanding the teachings, symbolism, relationships, or spiritual knowledge that existed within the community. Public visibility did not remove the boundaries that protected the tradition.
Hurston also described the condition of Hoodoo during her lifetime by writing:
“Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America with all the intensity of a suppressed religion.”
The word suppressed provides important historical context. Suppression does not mean a tradition has disappeared. It means the tradition continues despite legal, social, religious, or cultural pressure. Throughout American history, many practitioners protected themselves by teaching through trusted family members, apprenticeships, oral tradition, coded language, and close community relationships. Those methods of preservation allowed Hoodoo to survive while reducing the risks associated with openly practicing Black spirituality during periods of intense discrimination and criminalization.
This historical context also helps explain why Zora chose to document what she could. She understood that preserving history and protecting sacred knowledge are not opposing ideas. A community can preserve its history while still maintaining boundaries around the knowledge that belongs within that community. Her work consistently demonstrates that distinction by recording the voices of practitioners while also documenting that certain aspects of Hoodoo remained private.
Her commitment to preservation extended beyond Hoodoo. While interviewing Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known survivors of the Clotilda, publishers asked her to rewrite his testimony into standard English. She refused because his story was part of Black history, and preserving his voice meant preserving the way he remembered his own life. As a result, Barracoon remained unpublished for decades. That decision reflected the same commitment found throughout her work: preserving Black voices as they were spoken rather than reshaping them to meet someone else’s expectations.
History also records that Zora Neale Hurston’s work was not widely celebrated during her lifetime. She experienced financial hardship, professional criticism, and died in relative obscurity. Today, however, her writings remain some of the most important historical records documenting Black folklore, Black culture, and Hoodoo during the early twentieth century. Much of what survives today exists because she recognized that cultures can disappear when their own people are no longer the ones preserving their stories.
Zora Neale Hurston was not documenting Hoodoo because she wanted to give it away. She was documenting a people who understood their history was already being observed, interpreted, and rewritten by outsiders. By preserving our language, our stories, and the testimony of our own practitioners, she helped ensure that future generations would have access to records created from within the community instead of relying entirely on the interpretations of those looking in from the outside.
Before calling Zora Neale Hurston a sellout, study the historical conditions she worked under, the purpose behind her documentation, and the legacy she left behind. Her work remains one of the most significant acts of cultural preservation in the history of Hoodoo.
Sources
Hurston, Zora Neale. Hoodoo in America. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 44, No. 174, 1931.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1935.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. Written 1927. Published by Amistad, 2018.
Boas, Franz. Preface to Mules and Men. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1935.
