Anyone who knows me knows that I have a thing for the works of Langston Hughes. There's something about his words that sparks passion within me. As I am finishing up my Master's degree, now more than ever I have been heavily reflecting on who I am and what I want to be moving toward in the future. And in this self-reflection, I found myself once again leaning into Hughes's writings. This time around, I've been reflecting on Hughes's essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain".
Originally published in The Nation Magazine on June 23, 1926, as part of an issue focused on difficulties faced by Black American artists, Hughes posits that " 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".
Now while I don't agree with everything Hughes asserted in the article (I believe that Blackness is a bit more nuanced and multi-faceted than what Hughes argues), I do agree on a lot with what he has to say. In particular, I am quite fond of the last few sentences of the essay wherein Hughes speaks to the objectives of the young artists of the Harlem Renaissance:
We 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.
Inspired by these words, I wrote my own version of this paragraph which is in the image below. While written to some mirror Hughes's writing, I believe the Manifesto can be made to reflect all Black artists of any age. At any rate, I hope you enjoy the manifesto and look forward to writing to you all soon!
