Zora Adams-Williams is a psychology major and women’s studies and public health minor who will wear the commencement robe of her namesake, Zora Neale Hurston’s robe on commencement day, May 17. The robe is Zora Neale Hurston’s bachelor robe from Barnard College when she graduated in 1928.
Zora Neale Hurston is the prolific African-American woman author from 1920 to 1950 and was praised for her writing and condemned for her independence, and fearlessness. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, but grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black town in the United States. Hurston’s best-known work was published in 1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that narrates main character Janie Crawford’s “ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny.”
Adams-Williams had an unconventional childhood growing up across three continents: North America, Africa, and Europe. In 2011, she graduated from Lincoln Community School in Accra, Ghana. Following high school, she knew she wanted to attend an HBCU. While living in Ghana, her mother was a professor at the University of Legon who had Spelman students in her class, so over a period of three years she learned and was influenced to go to Spelman.
Adams-Williams mother, Dr. Anne Adams, professor emerit from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, told her about the 87-year-old robe when she was 19-years-old. For 20 years, the robe was stored in their home in Upstate New York.
The mother of Dr. Adams’s friend, Lucy Kramer Cohen who went to Barnard College with Hurston, learned that Adams-Williams was named after Hurston she bequeathed the robe to her as an infant. While Adams-Williams knew the robe was special because of the legacy of Hurston her namesake, she did not know the robe was in her family’s possession until her first year at Spelman. She did not see and try on the gown until her junior year.
“When I took it out of the closet, I kind of stared at it a very long time because of the shock my namesake wore it and now it’s mine. I was in a state of shock for about five minutes and then my mother actually said try it on and I did and it just felt amazing. I’m proud of Zora’s work, and the legacy she’s left behind and to just being connected to that is wonderful.”
The robe is a traditional black gown, at the bottom it has very thin lines of thread and most noticeable are the pointed sleeves.
Post graduation she hopes to work for AmeriCorps National Health Corps or Community Health Corps, working in a health facility in Pittsburg serving underserved communities. “I hope to work there and assist people signing up for health care and help them manage their health.
Following commencement she will loan the robe to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., because they have the proper resources to preserve the robe, but she hopes to wear the robe when she earns her doctoral degree and keep it in the family.