In This New Hour: Memory’s Insistence in Black Study

In June of 1945, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois with a proposition. Black people needed a resting place, a burial ground of sorts, for “the illustrious Negro dead.” She feared that the absence of a tangible place to gather in communion for commemorating the brave and notable artists and intellectuals “allows our people to forget, and their spirits evaporate.” She conjured the following scene for Du Bois to imagine: “Let there be a hall of meeting, and let the Negro sculptors and painters decorate it with scenes from our own literature and life. Mythology and all. Funerals can be held from there as well.” We must not allow those whom our traditions pass through to “lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she urged. Like so many before and after her, Hurston insisted that we remember…