Integration
Hurston appeared to oppose integration based on pride and her sense of independence. She would not "bow low before the white man", and claimed "adequate Negro schools" already existed in 1955.[97] Hurston is described as a "trailblazer for black women's empowerment" because of her numerous individual achievements and her strong belief that black women could be "self-made". However, a common criticism of her work is that the vagueness of her racial politics in her writing, particularly about black feminism, makes her "a prime candidate for white intellectual idolatry."[98] Darwin T. Turner, an English professor and specialist in African-American literature, faulted Hurston in 1971 for opposing integration and for opposing programs to guarantee blacks the right to work.[99]
Research and representation
Some authors criticized Hurston for her sensationalist representation of voodoo.[100] In The Crisis magazine in 1943, Harold Preece criticized Hurston for her perpetuation of "Negro primitivism" in order to advance her own literary career.[101] The Journal of Negro History complained that her work on voodoo was an indictment of African-American ignorance and superstition.[102]
Jeffrey Anderson states that Hurston's research methods were questionable and that she fabricated material for her works on voodoo. He observed that she admitted to inventing dialogue for her book Mules and Men in a letter to Ruth Benedict and described fabricating the Mules and Men story of rival voodoo doctors as a child in her later autobiography. Anderson believes that many of Hurston's other claims in her voodoo writings are dubious as well.[103]
Several authors have contended that Hurston engaged in significant plagiarism, and her biographer Robert Hemenway argues that the article "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" (1927) was approximately 25% original, the rest being plagiarized from Emma Langdon Roche's Historic Sketches of the Old South.[104] Hemenway does not claim that this undermines the validity of her later fieldwork: he states that Hurston "never plagiarized again; she became a major folklore collector".[105]
