Initially charged simply for being a Communist, on July 22 Herndon was indicted for violating the insurrection statute. The ILD retained two local Black lawyers, John H. Geer and Benjamin Davis, Jr., the latter a scion of a prominent Black Republican family who would go on to become a national leader in the Communist Party.
The rabidly anti-Communist prosecutor, John Hudson, sought the death penalty for Herndon for possessing the material. But Davis and Geer showed that the material in Herndon’s possession was readily available in the public library. And Davis turned the tables by insisting that “lynching is insurrection” and that the systematic exclusion of Black people from the jury pool was a violation of Herndon’s rights, rendering any indictment against him invalid.
On January 18, 1933, an all-white jury found Herndon guilty but spared him execution by sentencing him to eighteen to twenty years on the chain gang. After securing his release on bail in October 1934, the ILD sent Herndon on a national tour to talk about his case in the larger struggle against class oppression, racial injustice, and fascism. “Today, when the world is in danger of being pushed into another blood-bath,” he warned in one of his stump speeches, “when Negroes are being shot down and lynched wholesale, when every sort of outrage is taking place against the masses of people—today is the time to act.”
The tour ended after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal, sending him back to prison in October 1935. His legal team then turned to the insurrection statute itself and succeeded in convincing a Fulton County Superior Court judge that the law was unconstitutional. Herndon was released again on bond three months after he returned to prison. Predictably, the Georgia supreme court rejected the lower court’s ruling, setting the stage for a second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1937 in a 5–4 decision finally struck down Georgia’s insurrection statute, vacating Herndon’s conviction for good.
But in 1935, as Herndon crisscrossed the country fighting for his life, the Nazis consolidated power in Germany, Japan occupied Manchuria, Britain and France tightened their grip on the colonies, and Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Black radicals heeded Herndon’s plea “to act,” mobilizing in defense of Ethiopia, resisting lynch law in the South, organizing a global anticolonial movement, and defending Republican Spain from the fascists.
Angelo’s brother, Milton Herndon, died fighting Franco’s troops in the Spanish Civil War. He told his men why he was there: “Yesterday, Ethiopia. Today, Spain. Tomorrow, maybe America. Fascism won’t stop anywhere—until we stop it.” His words still ring true.
1934–1939
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Bernice L. McFadden
When I was a child, using the words ain’t, huh, and hey would reap an icy gaze from an elder or, worse, a pinch or slap, followed by the correction:
Bernice, the word is:
Isn’t. Yes. Hello.
Historically, so-called Bad English or improper grammar was attributed to poor and uneducated people. It was considered lazy English, created by “lazy” Blacks, those Africans who were enslaved in America and worked from can’t see to can’t see, bonded people who were quite literally worked to death.
My siblings and I were educated in private schools and spent summers in Barbados. We children were neither poor nor uneducated, so that sort of language was unacceptable in my household. We were expected to speak proper English if we aspired to be accepted and respected in the white world.
I grew up in a family that was Southern on my maternal side and Caribbean on my paternal side. These relatives had migrated and immigrated to New York, stubbornly clinging to the customs of their birth homes. So I was raised in a family full of interesting and complex dialects, all of which I adopted.
Truth is, Standard American English has never felt comfortable on my tongue. It is as unnatural to me as swimming fully clothed in the ocean. Today, even in middle age, I still speak in a dialect that I lovingly refer to as Yankee Bajan.
I discovered Zora Neale Hurston in the summer of 1987. I was twenty-one years old and an aspiring writer unsure of what or whom I wanted to write about.
When I opened Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was immediately struck by Hurston’s use of dialect, and a door in my mind creaked loudly ajar.
In 1934 Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. It was well received by readers and critics alike. Hurston was celebrated for her use of Negro dialect. “Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race,” wrote Margaret Wallace in The New York Times. “Miss Hurston, who is a graduate of Barnard College and student of anthropology, has made the study of Negro folklore her special province. This may very well account for the brilliantly authentic flavor of her novel and for her excellent rendition of Negro dialect.”
Perhaps Hurston’s well-worded and sophisticated prose, set in contrast to the dialogue, led Wallace to assume that Hurston’s education was what allowed her to expertly mimic the Southern Negro dialect. It probably never occurred to Wallace that this achievement was the result not of an education at a prominent academic institution but of Hurston’s bilinguality. After all, Zora had been born in Alabama and raised in Florida, in towns populated by Black people. The people and their ways of communicating weren’t foreign to her—she was writing about home.
Black language, now known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), was born in the American South during slavery when bonded people, separated from their familial tribes, mixed with Africans who spoke different languages. In an effort to communicate with their fellow men and women—and their captors—they stitched together scraps of several languages, including that of their enslavers, and created the melodic and nuanced dialect that Hurston used in her work, a dialect that still survives today.
In 1936 Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the folk religions of Jamaica and Haiti. While in Haiti, she wrote, in just seven weeks’ time, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a story that she said “had been dammed up in me.”
Published in the fall of 1937, during the Great Depression, Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on Janie Crawford, who finds herself married to the controlling Jody, a man who does not allow her to speak or communicate with friends. In contrast, when she meets Tea Cake, he is happy to hear what she has to say, encouraging her to share her thoughts and engage with others. This new relationship forges a feeling of empowerment and joy within Janie.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jody can be construed as a metaphor for white people eager to silence the thoughts and expressions of Black people.
But Zora Neale Hurston would not be muted.
The publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God was met with criticism. The harshest came from Richard Wright, who accused Hurston of writing into and not above the stereotypes and tropes that had plagued Black people from slavery into Jim Crow. It was his stance that if a Black person took up a pen to write, that pen should be used as a sword to wage war against the oppressive white racist regime. Anything less was a frivolous waste of ink and paper. “Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley,” Wright wrote.