Writer, Zora Neale Hurston was born, 1901

Zora Neale Hurston was an American author and anthropologist of the 19th century. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Her parents John and Lucy Ann Hurston were former slaves. John Hurston was a pastor and he moved his family to Florida when Zora was still a young child. He later served as mayor of the town where they lived. Zora’s mother died in 1904 and her father remarried almost immediately. She was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville but was eventually kicked out when her father stopped paying her tuition. She worked as a maid for a travelling theatrical company in order to support herself and continue her education.

Hurston enrolled at Morgan College in 1917 and graduated a year later in 1918. Then she enrolled at Howard University for her undergraduate degree. There she studied Spanish, English and Greek along with public speaking and co-founded a student newspaper called “The Hilltop” where she published some of her earliest work. She completed her degree in 1920. In 1925 she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College at Columbia University, where she conducted research in anthropology with a distinguished anthropologist named Franz Boas. She received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928 at the age of 37, but spent two more years at Columbia working as a graduate student.

Hurston moved to the Harlem neighborhood in New York City where she made a number of influential friends including renowned poets and social activists such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. There was a burgeoning art scene in New York of which Zora soon became a part. Her apartment was noted as a famous meeting place for leading intellectuals of the time. She also travelled extensively to conduct research for her books such as the Southern states of U.S. as well as the Caribbean Islands. On each of her travels she noted the local cultural practices, the details of which she published in her 1935 book titled “Mules and Men”. She also contributed articles to several magazines, including the Journal of American

Marian Anderson made debut at Metropolitan Opera House as Alrica in Verdis Masked Ball. She was the first Black singer in the companys history.

Zora Neale Hurston, known for her audacious spirit and sharp wit, was a talented and prolific writer and a skilled anthropologist from the Harlem (New York) Renaissance to the Civil Rights Era. Born on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, she grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.  Her idyllic life in this provincial rural town was shattered with the death of her mother when Hurston was fourteen and her father’s unexpected remarriage.  In a few years Hurston was on her own working as a maid.  She settled in Baltimore, Maryland and completed her education at Morgan Academy and Howard University.

In September 1925 Hurston entered Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with the distinguished scholar Franz Boas. She received her B.A. in 1928.  Throughout this period, however, Hurston continued to write.  In June 1925 her short story “Spunk” was published in Opportunity.   In collaboration with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, Hurston in the late 1920s edited the short-lived magazine Fire!  Collaborating with Langston Hughes, in 1930 she wrote her first play titled Mule Bone, a comedy about African American rural folk life.  Four years later Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, loosely based on the life of her father, a rural minister.  In 1935 she authored Mules and Men, a volume of anthropological folklore.

Hurston’s most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937 followed by Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939, and Seraph on the Suwanee, the least successful of her works, in 1948. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared in 1942.

Zora Neale Hurston

ANTHROPOLOGIST, FOLKLORIST & WRITER

Birthplace: Eatonville, Florida.

January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960

Zoras parents were John Hurston and Lucy Potts Hurston. Her mother died when she

was a child. In 1917, she moved from Eatonville to Baltimore, Maryland due to some

problems at home. She obtained her formal education from Morgan Academy, Howard

Prep School, Howard University and Barnard College. While she was at Barnard, her

mentor was Frank Boas, a famous anthropologist.

Zora was apart of the great black literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance.

Sadly, later in life Zora became destitute in her finances as well as her health. She died at the St. Lucie

County Welfare home and was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, an African American novelist,

discovered her grave and put a gravemarker on the site in 1973. Some of Zoras literary works are:

Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934)

Mules and Men (1935)

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Tell My Horse (1938)

Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

Leading 20th Century black historian Rayford Whittingham Logan was born on January 7, 1897 in Washington, D.

W.B. Purvis patented the fountain pen

Mississippi constitutional convention (seventeen Blacks, eighty-three whites) met in Jackson.

Raila Odinga , in full Raila Amolo Odinga (born January 7, 1945, Maseno, Kenya), Kenyan businessman and politician who served as prime minister of Kenya (2008–13) following the contentious presidential election of December 2007.

The James Weldon Johnson Collection opens at Yale University. It includes the papers of Johnson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and many writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Arkansas constitutional convention (eight Blacks, forty-three whites) met in Little Rock.

Ethiopian Christmas Celebration of Genna

White teens in Howard Beach chased Michael Griffith, an African-American youth, onto a freeway where he was hit by a motorist. Griffith

died from his injuries setting off a wave of protests and racial tensions in New York.

Preamble:

Whereas the subscribers, women of color of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, actuated by a natural feeling for the welfare of our friends, have thought fit to associate for the diffusion of knowledge, the suppression of vice and immorality, and for cherishing such virtues as will render us happy and useful to society, sensible of the gross ignorance under which we have too long labored, but trusting by the blessing of God, we shall be able to accomplish the object of our union—we have therefore associated ourselves under the name of the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society and have adopted the following Constitution.

Art. 1st. The officers of this Society shall be a President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and a Board of Directors of five—all of whom shall be annually elected.

Art 2nd. Regular meetings of the Society shall be held on the first Thursday of every month, at which each member shall pay twenty-five cents, and pay twelve and a half cents at every monthly meeting thenceforth.

Art. 3d. The money thus collected shall be appropriate for the purchasing of books, the hiring of a room and other contingencies.

Art. 4th. The books and other articles purchased by this Society, shall be considered as the Society’s property; and should the Society cease to exist, said property shall be disposed of by auction, and each member receive her proportional part of the proceeds accruing from such sale.

Art. 5th. It shall be the duty of the President to preserve order at the meetings of said society, and to call special meetings when occasion may require.

Art. 6th. In the absence of the President, the Vice President shall preside; and in the absence of both, the Secretary shall preside.

Art. 7th. It shall be the duty of the Treasurer to pay all orders drawn on her by the Secretary, and signed by the President.  The Treasurer shall give bonds to the Society for the faithful discharge of the duties of her office.

Art. 8th. The Secretary shall keep an account of the receipts and expenditures of the

Inventor, WB Purvis, patents the fountain pen, 1890

Shirley Franklin is sworn in as the first African American Mayor of Atlanta and the only African American female mayor of a major American city.

Jay-Z’s name is a shortened version of an early nickname, “Jazzy”… Another popular nickname for Jay-Z is “Jiggy”… In 2005 he announced he wanted to be known by his real name, Shawn Carter, but he has remained most widely known by his nickname… Jay-Z and Beyoncé have a daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, born on January 7, 2012, and twins born in June of 2017.

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891[1] [2] – January 28, 1960) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist known for her contributions to African-American literature, her portrayal of racial struggles in the American South, and works documenting her research on Haitian voodoo.[3] Of Hurstons four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved to Eatonville, Florida, with her family in 1894. Eatonville would become the setting for many of her stories and is now the site of the Zora! Festival, held each year in Hurstons honor.[4] In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while attending Barnard College.[5] While in New York she became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!.[6] After moving back to Florida, Hurston published her literary anthropology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935) and her first three novels: Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurstons works touched on the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades, but interest revived after author Alice Walker published In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. Hurstons manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives.

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and

Jay-Z is an American rap musician, producer and entrepreneur, and one of the most commercially successful recording artists in America. He was born as Shawn Corey Carter on December 4, 1969 but is better known by his stage name of Jay-Z. His beginnings were humble as he lived in a housing project in Brooklyn, New York with his mother Gloria Carter and his three older siblings. His father, Adnes Reeves, walked out on the family when he was 11 years old. Jay-Z attended Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn and sold drugs on the street to help supplement his mother’s income when he was a teenager. At school he was friends with Christopher Wallace, who become the future rap superstar “Notorious B.I.G.”.

In 1989, Jay-Z made his first rap appearance with the rapper Jaz-O and the duo recorded a song called “The Originators” which procured them an appearance on MTV on an episode of “Yo! MTV Raps”. He continued to make music but did not achieve much success until he founded his own record label by the name of Roc-A-Fella Records in 1996, along with two of his friends, Damon Dash and Kareem Burke. In June 1996, Jay-Z launched his debut album titled “Reasonable Doubt” which reached No. 23 on the Billboard charts. In 1997 he released his second album titled “In My Lifetime, Vol. 1” followed by his second album released in 1998, titled “Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life” for which he earned a Grammy nomination. This marked the beginning of his successful career as a rapper and in the intervening years, Jay-Z launched a number of bestselling albums such as “Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter” in 1999, “The Blueprint” in 2001, “The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse” in 2002 and “The Black Album” in 2003.

In 2003, Jay-Z announced his intention of retirement from the world of rap, choosing instead to focus on producing albums and giving time to his business. He became the president of Def Jam Recordings, an American record label owned by Universal Music Group, where he signed renowned artists such as Rihanna and Ne-Yo, and helped the