On Having It

Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.

Zora Neale Hurston, Howard ’27, Folklorist, anthropologist & author

Zora Neale Hurston

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Crystal A. deGregory, Ph.D.
http://www.crystaldegregory.com
Dr. Crystal A. deGregory is a historian, storyteller, and convener whose work centers the power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the lives of Black women and girls. She is the founder of HBCUstory and editor-in-chief of The Journal of HBCU Research + Culture, as well as Founding Director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University. A trusted architect of public history and cultural memory, she created the Bethune at 150 Syllabus and convened the 2025 Southern Association for Women Historians Triennial Meeting, where she was named the organization’s first-ever Honorary Lifetime Member. Through her forthcoming platform Her Due, deGregory advances overdue recognition for women’s labor, leadership, and legacy. Known for transforming history into strategy, she builds spaces where scholarship fuels equity, culture, and community. Follow her @HBCUstorian.

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1 COMMENT

  1. This is not what Hurston wrote. In 1942 Zora Neale Hurston published an autobiography titled “Dust Tracks on a Road”, and it included the quotation; however, the wording differed from the two versions given above:

    If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.

    Here is an excerpt showing that Hurston was discussing the future success of blacks in the United States and the world. In this passage she emphasized the perspective of the individual. Boldface has been added: 1

    It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.

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