Carrie Meek: “I rise today in celebration of women's history month and in celebration of the life and the contributions of a great…”

“I rise today in celebration of women's history month and in celebration of the life and the contributions of a great black woman writer and a great Floridian. Have you ever heard of a shooting star that lit up the night skies, fell to Earth--and then rose again, soaring higher and brighter than ever? Such a star was Zora Neale Hurston. Born in 1891, Zora's star flashed across the heavens during the 1930's and 1940's in a dazzling literary display that had all the world taking notice. She was a writer whose everyday life revolved around her kin-folks and skin folks. She was an anthropologist, with a keen consciousness of cultural equity, trained to interpret one culture to another. However, contrary to much of the social science thinking of her day, she saw nothing pathological about black life in the rural south. She did not view black people as deviating from a white cultural norm. Zora once wrote: Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice box seasons his own food. Zora was her name. Born in the all black town of Eatonville, FL, this pioneering role model--a woman who rejected sexist roles--traveled some of the roughest and most remote parts of the rural South with only a handgun, a $2 dress, and suitcase full of courage. Zora was a liberated women who was ahead of her time.”