Spanning more than three decades, Zora Neale Hurston's essays were penned during the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the Montgomery bus boycott, the desegregation of the military, and school integration. Hurston's writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could, and in these 50 essays, she comments on Jim Crow, jazz, church, voting; and the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor.