“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” is a brief essay by Zora Neale Hurston originally published in the 1928 edition of The World Tomorrow.  In it, she explores her own experience with race, in her customary brash manner. She makes clear that she speaks only for herself.

Raised in the all-Black community of Eatonville, FL, Hurston first encountered what was universally called “the race problem” as a young adult striving to gain an education in the north.

The tone of this essay doesn’t reflect the kind of intellectual propagandist Black pride displayed in the Harlem Renaissance (also known as New Negro movement) of the 1920s; yet it unabashedly pokes holes in the rampant segregation and bias that were woven into the fabric of American life, North or South. Read More→