Zora Neale Hurston died on Jan. 28, 1960 in Fort Pierce at the age of 69 from a stroke. After friends from near and far raised over $600 in her memory, Zora’s funeral was held at the Peek Funeral Chapel on Feb. 7, 1960. Zora was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in this (then segregated) cemetery called the Genesee Memorial Gardens in Fort Pierce.

In the early 1970s, Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, located the grave which she determined to be Zora’s, and so began Zora’s second rise from near obscurity to fame. In 1973, Alice Walker visited Eatonville and continued her Hurston pilgrimage to Fort Pierce to discover where Zora was buried. Walker’s search for Zora’s gravesite is described in the last chapter of her story, “Looking for Zora,” A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, I Love Myself When I am Laughing (1979), in which Walker describes searching the, then overgrown, cemetery with the help of a funeral home employee. Finally Walker stopped and decided to ‘ask’ Zora for help.

Thus Walker concluded that this was Zora’s gravesite, since it was the only one located near the center of the cemetery. She then ordered the headstone that now identifies the final resting place of the “Genius of the South.” Within a few years, an important biography of Zora, written by Robert Hemingway, was published, and Zora’s books began to reappear in the popular market.

In the 1980s, members of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority placed the large slab on top of the gravesite. Zora’s final resting place is stop #4 on the “Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail” in Fort Pierce. (Aug. 9, 2020)

Zora loved roses and flamboyant hats so artist James Liccione created this bas-relief sculpture panel as part of the Zora Neale Hurston Memorial bricked walkway created that leads to Zora’s headstone and gravesite slab at Sarah’s Memorial Garden cemetery in Fort Pierce. (Aug. 9, 2020)

A close-up of one of the bas-relief sculpture panels sealed into cemented columns of the Zora Neale Hurston Memorial bricked walkway created in 2010 by artist James Liccione that leads to Zora’s headstone and gravesite slab at Sarah’s Memorial Garden cemetery in Fort Pierce. Local artist Pat Cochran and helpers framed and poured the concrete blocks and columns to serve as a frame for the bas-relief sculpture panels. The two memorial columns are about 8-feet tall and 3.5 feet wide with bas-relief Zora-inspired panels on both the front and back of the columns. (Aug. 9, 2020)