February 21

I found “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes very interesting.  Hughes was the only Harlem Renaissance writer to remain productive long after the Harlem Renaissance’s end.  Hughes was also the first poet to bring the blues into literary verse.  Hughes muses included black urban poor and working class.  In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, Hughes basically says that the colored middle class is taught to be ashamed of his heritage whereas the poor working class still hold true to themselves.  This can be seen in two separate passages where it is written, “One sees immediately how difficult it would be for [a colored middle class poet] to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people…He is taught rather…to be ashamed of [that beauty] when it is not according to Caucasian patterns” and, “[the so-called common element] furnish a wealth of colorful distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of [Caucasian] standardizations.”