Zora Neale Hurston is most associated with the Harlem Renaissance, an early cultural movement during which African-American intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians sought to create art that represented a more modern perspective on African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was the artistic arm of the larger movement for greater civil rights for African Americans that came to the fore in the aftermath of World War I and as a result of the Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to cities such as New York and Chicago. Hurston's life and work as represented in the memoir has important connections—and disjunctions—with some of the prevailing tendencies in the representation of the Harlem Renaissance.

Chapter 9, "School Again," includes the story of how Hurston's college years brought her into contact with Charles S. Johnson and other important figures who helped to give birth to the movement and inspired Hurston—like so many others—to head to New York. Hurston's self-representation in these chapters is one that demonstrates how she contributed to the movement. Hurston claims, for example, to have been instrumental in bringing folk music from the African diaspora and a more natural presentation of African-American spirituals to the American stage.