The conflicted racial identity politics of Zora Neale Hurston climaxed in
a statement printed in February 1943 in the New York Herald Telegram. In
the article, “When Negro Succeeds, South is Proud,” Hurston argued
that “the Jim Crow system works.” Hurston later retracted this
statement, claiming that it was taken out of context and grossly distorted. Hurston
said that her point was to show that “there was plenty of race prejudice
both north and south” but that the South “by opportunity of long
practice had worked out a system, while the North, caught between
declarations of no prejudice, and its actual feelings [ctdot ] was groping around
for the same thing, but with fine phrases.”