Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 during the Great Depression and long after the 1920s height of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement during which Black artists asserted their right to self-representation. Nevertheless, Hurston, who was an active writer in Harlem in the 1920s, expanded the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance to cover not only Black lives in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic but also the South.

During the Harlem Renaissance, writers and artists sought to celebrate the beauty, creativity, and originality of African American culture. Writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke saw these artistic contributions as proof that African Americans were full citizens during an era when Jim Crow laws and mob violence prevented the full exercise of their rights. Some artists and critics who embraced the political program of the Harlem Renaissance felt pressure to present positive images to white audiences in an effort to transform the image of Black Americans from the rural, uneducated stereotype that dominated the white imagination. Of particular importance was changing the representation of Black women from either the sexless enslaved “Mammies” or promiscuous “Jezebels” who tempted virtuous white men into sin.