The conflicted racial identity politics of Zora Neale Hurston climaxed in a statement printed in February 1943 in the New York Herald Telegram. In the article, “When Negro Succeeds, South is Proud,” Hurston argued that “the Jim Crow system works.” Hurston later retracted this statement, claiming that it was taken out of context and grossly distorted. Hurston said that her point was to show that “there was plenty of race prejudice both north and south” but that the South “by opportunity of long practice had worked out a system, while the North, caught between declarations of no prejudice, and its actual feelings [ctdot ] was groping around for the same thing, but with fine phrases.”