Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
by Langston Hughes

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express
our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.
The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain
free within ourselves.


Context of the poem:
Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University and Lincoln University. While a student at Lincoln, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), as well as his landmark essay, seen by many as a cornerstone document articulation of the Harlem renaissance, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

Earlier that year, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, mailed Hughes a proof of “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay George Schuyler had written for the magazine, requesting a counterstatement. Schuyler, editor of the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, questioned in his essay the need for a separate African-American artistic and literary tradition.

Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

His attention to working-class African-American lives, coupled with his refusal to paint these lives as either saintly or stereotypical, brought criticism from several directions. Articulating the unspoken directives he struggled to ignore, Hughes observes, “‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites.”
Read Langston Hughes full essay here:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237858



More about Langston Huges:  http://experiencinghistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/negro-speaks-of-rivers.html


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