Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place during the 1920s and '30s and is set in a series of all-black communities in rural Florida. After the Civil War, former slaves formed a number of towns all over the South, in an effort to escape the segregation and discrimination they experienced among whites. By 1914, approximately thirty such towns were in existence. Eatonville, Florida, the town where Zora Neale Hurston grew up and the setting for much of Their Eyes Were Watching God, was the first such town to be incorporated and to win the right of self-governance. In Eatonville, the Jim Crow laws that segregated public schools, housing, restaurants, theaters, and drinking fountains all over the South, did not exist.