The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

In Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the writer presents his argument regarding the creative limitations Black Americans face. Initially published in 1926, the essay traces a short, powerful argument that relies both on Hughes’s own identity as an artist as well as his critical observations of US society. As a Black author writing in the early 20th century, Hughes uses the terms “Negro” and “black” interchangeably; this study guide exclusively uses the more current term “Black” to adhere as closely as possible to Hughes’s original linguistic intentions. This study guide refers to an electronically published version of the essay via the Poetry Foundation’s website, which can be accessed here: www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69395/the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain. This essay is published in many versions; for ease of access, quotations in this guide are cited in reference to the number of the paragraph in which they appear.

Hughes opens his essay with an anecdote regarding a “promising” young Black poet’s statement that he doesn’t want to be “a Negro poet” (Paragraph 1). Hughes interprets the young poet’s reluctance as an expression of both self-hatred and a desire to be White. Using this statement as a framework for his argument, Hughes describes ways that Black people are taught to hate their Blackness while they simultaneously desire Whiteness. Hughes complicates this argument by integrating his understanding of class: middle-class Black people are more likely to try to follow White cultural patterns, while the “common people” (Paragraph 4) are less afraid to be themselves.

One of the central tenets of Hughes’s essay is that Black artists must embrace their “racial individuality” (Paragraph 5), and all this individuality encompasses, rather than seek assimilation. To illustrate this point, Hughes describes a Black woman who owns her own club in Philadelphia, where she chose to employ a White woman to sing folksongs but refused to hire a Black woman to do the same. This resistance to Blackness, Hughes argues, is present in many aspects of Black life.

Because the Black community is unable to embrace and love their own Blackness, Hughes describes the road “for the serious black artist…who would produce a racial art… [as] rocky” (Paragraph 7). Not only must the Black artist work against his own community’s critique, but he must also live with the more obvious disapproval and potential censure from a White audience.

Hughes feels strongly that his Blackness is an essential part of his own artistic practice. He states his wish for all Black artists, desiring a sense of freedom for them as well as for himself. According to Hughes, the new Black artists who are willing to “express [their] individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (Paragraph 14) will create a new artistic world, standing “on top of the mountain, free within [them]selves” (Paragraph 14). In this closing statement to the essay, Hughes drives home his point that neither assimilation nor self-hatred serve the Black artist; instead, self-love, honesty, and independence will lead to both artistic and cultural freedom.