 a burlesque of the integrationist dream.  Emotionally, as far as race was concerned, she was a girl without a country,  Fauset mourned for one such woman in her final novel, Comedy: American Style (1933).  Later on in life it occurred to her that she had been deprived of her racial birthright and that that was as great a cause for tears as any indignity that might befall man.   What is fundamentally important to mankind everywhere,  Fauset understood, is  love of kind, love of home...love of race. 
Jessie Fausets ardent hope was that colored boys and girls be raised in the fullest knowledge of their birthright. In There Is Confusion Joanna comes home from school and asks plaintively,  Didn t colored people ever do anything, Daddy?  Her father then tells her  of Douglass and Vesey and Turner. There were
great women too, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, women who had been slaves, he explained to her, but had won their way to fame and freedom through their own efforts.  She abhorred sugarcoating and counseled truth:  The successful  Negro  novel must limn Negro men and women as they really are, with not only their virtues but their faults,  she averred.
It was for the Joannas of America that Fauset and DuBois edited The Brownies Book, an unprofitable monthly published from January 1920 until it folded two years later. This wholesome hodgepodge of homilies, lore, and biography was dedicated, Fauset rhymed:
To children, who with eager look
Scanned vainly library shelf, and nook, For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples  glory.
The publication s purpose, declared the editors, was-  To make colored children realize that being  colored  is a normal, beautiful
152
thing. To make them familiar with the history and a< the Negro race. To make them know that other cc have grown into beautiful, useful, and famous pet them delicately a code of honor and action in their white children. To turn their little hurts and resentm lation, ambition, and love of their homes and compa: out the best amusements and joys and worthwhile th inspire them to prepare for definite occupations ant broad spirit of sacrifice. 
Fauset devoted her career to acts of ancestor covery and restoration. She translated Haitia her sister died she endowed a "I Men Lann the public school in which NUs. Lanning h room was  to contain books only about cole pecially colored children. She sponsored similar
S upston was suspicious ol anyone, from let! or Right, who Med individuals hy category: "The solace ol easy generalization was taken from me, but I received the richer gift ol individualism," she wrote.
U
schools. In 1932 Fauset insisted,  No part of b needs more building up than biography..   h is t'r tious Negro youth be able to read of the achievi race....There should be some sort of Plutarchs hit race. Someday, perhaps, I shall get around to writ!
She didn t. A marriage a happy, compann intervened, and the illness of various relatives b nurse in Jessie Fauset. She published no books bet her death in 1961. Unlike Zora Neale Hurston, J enjoyed no spectacular revival nor, given the unfas her resolutely middle-class colored American subjects. Yet she speaks to us still. The better Afrocent: Helen Lanning Comers. Renewed appreciation of si tural achievements as baseball s Negro Leagues is v Fauset stream. Every Ohio boy reading Langston Hi every black girl who feels a confident, bitterless p and her country is a daughter of Jessie Fauset.
Associate Editor Bill Kaufman is the author of Every Mai Towns of New York, and America First!
30. Alternative Afrocentrisms
Old Philadelphian Jessie Fauset on black roots
He started out as a slave but he rarely thinks of that. To himself he is a citizen of the United States whose ancestors came over not along with the emigrants in the Mayflower, it is true, but merely a little earlier in the good year 1619. His forebears are to him quite simply early settlers who played a pretty large part in making the land grow. He boasts no Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, but he knows that as a matter of fact and quite inevitably his sons and daughters date their ancestry as far back as any. So quite as naturally as his white compatriots he speaks of
his  old  Boston families,  old Philadelphians,   old Charlestonians. And he has wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of labor. He is still sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress on [the] first two of these four.
Briefly he is a dark American who wears his joy and rue very much as does the white American. He may wear it with some differences but it is the same joy and the same rue.
 from The Chinaberry Tree, 1931
l&ora Neale Hurston
y David T. Beito
ora Neale Hurston has been rediscovered. Her reputation shines luch brighter today, in fact, than it ever did in her lifetime. A articipant in the Harlem Renaissance as a folklorist and play-'right, she became a best-selling novelist in the 1930s and 1940s. ess than two decades later, she died in obscurity and poverty. Her rputation languished until 1975 when Alice Walker, the author f The Color Purple, published a laudatory essay in Ms. Since then, Hurston has inspired a virtual cottage industry of books and arti-les. Her fiction has been embraced by assorted varieties of femi-ists, multiculturalists, and black nationalists. A kind of Zoramania 05 taken hold among the politically correct in particular.
There is no small amount of irony here. For Hurston sub--tibed to political views that would surprise many of her modern ms. She backed the Republican presidential primary bid of > bert Taft in 1952, condemned the Supreme Court s decision in ^rou>n v. Board of Education, and implied that Eleanor Roosevelt ad cynically manipulated black voters. If Hurston could partici-ate in todays political debates, she would no doubt be consigned ? a netherworld populated by the likes of Walter Williams, nomas Sowell, and Anne Wortham.
The environment of Hurston s youth nurtured attitudes of 'vidualism and self-reliance. She grew up in the all-black town nd	^or'^a  where her father, a former sharecropper
son of a slave, once served as mayor. Eatonville was the set-or ^urstons most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching ' 937). With much justification, Saturday Review put it  in same category with that of the William Faulkner, an	Fhzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway of enduring Ameri-
, ltJrature. Not all the reviews were positive. Novelist |em , bright, then a member of the Communist party, con-)e the novel s implicit message that the lives of blacks could )rejPPrec*ated apart from a focus on racist and capitalistic op-leted ni,^a'n Locke, a leader in the Harlem Renaissance, won-Sn   , , en hlurston would take up the more legitimate task of Clal document fiction. 
Wright and Locke were right to be worried over Hurston s freethinking. While she never expressed a systematic political philosophy, Hurston s instincts, as reflected in her writings, were those of a libertarian. Her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, has identified deep aversion to the then-fashionable model of  black pathology  as a major source for her views. Hurston found fault with the pathology model not only because it discounted the creative richness of black culture but because it gloried in victimization. It treated blacks as little more than cardboard cut-outs:  There is an over-simplification of the Negro. He is either pictured by the conservatives as happy, picking his banjo, or by the so-called liberals as low, miserable, and crying. The Negro s life is neither of these. Rather, it is in between, and above and below these pictures. 
One of the most worrisome implications of the  black pathology  approach was that it gave social engineers an entree to  rescue  blacks from themselves. Hurston s comments on the role played by the welfare state in this process were prescient. Welfare, she charged, was  the biggest weapon ever placed in [the] hands of those who sought power and votes.  It created a world that turned independent and prideful individuals into pawns of the  Little White Father  in Washington.  Once they had weakened that far,  she concluded,  it was easy to go on and on voting for more relief, and leaving government affairs in the hands of a few. 
Hurston was not a garden variety  black conservative,  however. Her novels and nonfiction reveal what today would be called individualist feminism. Camille Paglia would have delighted her. In many ways, she resembled her contemporaries Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, and Ayn Rand in personal and intellectual profile. All four women advanced an  Old Right  critique of the welfare state in the tradition of H. L Mencken, Robert Taft, and Garet Garrett
Hurston also shared an affinity with the isolationism of the Old Right. A now-restored chapter from the original manuscript of her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road features a biting indictment of imperalism. She declared:  I do not mean to single out England as something strange and different in the world. We, too, have our Marines in China. We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas of a country of their own.  For Hurston, international big-power politics represented little more than a glorified scramble for  protection money. 
153
5. AFRICAN AMERICANS
Her individualism, however, unlike that of Lane, Rand, and Pat erson, had to contend directly with the thorny question of race. Circumstances forced Hurston into an almost impossible dilemma. On the one hand, she deplored the imposed sorting of legal segregation. Hurston demanded  the complete repeal of all Jim Crow Laws in the United States once and for all, and right now.  At the same time, she was not about to entrust New Deal liberals with the job. They were  racial cardsharps  who would use any pretext to fasten dependency on big government. Faced with limited alternatives, she proved willing to support segregationists, such as Senator Spessard Holland of Florida, as long as they opposed the common enemy of welfare-state liberalism. Hurston may have made wrong choices but she certainly was not any more  naive  than New Dealers who had once formed alliances with Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and other vitriolic racists for the  greater good  of FDR s programs.
Race Pride and Race Consciousness seem to me to b fallacious, but a thing to be abhorred. 
Hurston was suspicious of anyone, from Left or Right, who judged individuals by category.  I found,  she asserted,  that I had no need of either class or race prejudice, those scourges of humanity. The solace of easy generalization was taken from me, but I received the richer gift of individualism.... So
In 1955, Hurston returned to the limelight by oppo; preme Court s decision in Brown v. Board of Education gated the ruling as  forced association  and as an ins teachers who taught in segregated schools.  It is a con' terms,  she argued,  to scream race pride and equality same time spuming Negro teachers and self-associatioi row impact of the ruling, however, was not as imports the long-term implications for liberty. She feared that it balloon  that would be used as a precedent in a larger replace the Constitution with  government by administrat Neither assimilationist, nor accomodationist, not Hurston defies tidy categorization within black history, guishes her is her ability to speak directly to the quest c for freedom and self-reliance. This gives her writing quality, and a very broad appeal.
David T. Beito is an assistant professor of history at the Alabama.
Zora Neale Hurston describes the joy of blackness
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given the