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Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver book cover
Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver
2020
First Published
4.44
Average Rating
24
Number of Pages
Originally published in The Journal of Negro History, this fascinating and important work records the recollections of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last surviving captives of the Clotilde, the final ship to dock in the United States with a cargo of African slaves. Lewis and Zora Neale Hurston provide an ethnography of Lewis' own Togo people, detail his capture by warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey, hardship and strife aboard the Clotilde en route to port in Alabama and his eventual liberation.
Avg Rating
4.44
Number of Ratings
18
5 STARS
67%
4 STARS
17%
3 STARS
11%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Author · 45 books

Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South. In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance. Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway. People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago. In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

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