Squaring the Ethical Circle: Zora Neale Hurston as a Doer of Justice
Channel: Yale Divinity School
Date: 17/04/2012

From October 11, 1952 to May 3, 1953 Zora Neale Hurston wrote twenty stories for the Pittsburgh Courier Newspaper detailing a landmark case in interracial relations. Using her distinct voice and powerful prose, Hurston's account of the trial of Ruby Jackson McCollum is a cautionary tale about injustice in one of this country's most famous murder cases. This lecture places in dramatic relief not only the trial itself, a trial that shook the foundations of racial segregation, but Hurston's fight to save McCollum from the electric chair, offers resources for 21st century ethicists wrestling with new possibilities for human existence in the midst of the existing social order.

Katie G. Cannon, Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary, presents the Margaret Lindquist Sorensen Lecture at Yale Divinity School