GRAPHICHarlem issue and the subsequent anthol-
ogy THE NEW NEGRO: AN INTERPRETATION
(1925) that ALAINLOCKEhad edited.
Schuyler’s theses seemed to challenge the very
notion on which Locke and others presented their
work and championed the powerful idea of a
Harlem Renaissance. According to Schuyler, there
was nothing distinctive about creative work pro-
duced by people of color in America. “As for the
literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframeri-
cans—such as there is,” he stated, “it is identical in
kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of
white Americans.” He then proposed that “the
Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-
Saxon” who “[a]side from his color, which ranges
from very dark brown to pink, your American
Negro is just plain American.” Schuyler concluded
by asking, “Why should the Negro artists of Amer-
ica vary from the national artistic norm when
Negro artists in other countries have not done
so?... One contemplates the popularity of the
Negro-art hokum and murmurs ‘How come?’”
Critic Michael Peplow suggests that Schuyler’s
“real purpose” was to “discredit long-standing and
entrenched stereotypes.” He also wanted to en-
dorse a retroactive assimilationism, one that recog-
nized the ways in which people of African descent
in America were completely interwoven into the
fabric of the nation. Schuyler’s essay appeared
alongside a rebuttal piece authored by Langston
Hughes. Nation editor Freda Kirchwey asked
Hughes to comment on the Schuyler essay and to
provide “an independent positive statement of the
case for a true Negro racial art” (Rampersad, 130).
As Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad notes, it
took the poet-activist less than one week to gener-
ate “THE NEGRO ARTIST AND THE RACIAL
MOUNTAIN,” “the finest essay of Hughes’s life”
(Rampersad, 130). In his piece, which appeared in
the same June 1926 issue of The Nationin which
Schuyler’s writing was published, Hughes sug-
gested that Negro art could be a reality and that its
creation was in fact frustrated by a “racial moun-
tain,” the “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” (Ram-
persad, 130). The essay and the additional debate
that it prompted called attention to the intense
racial politics of the day and the degree to which
the movement was inherently political during a
time when many people of color contended with
segregation, mob rule, and stereotypes even as they
saw the history and creative genius of African
Americans highlighted like never before.Bibliography
Leak, Jeffrey. Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of
George S. Schuyler.Knoxville: University of Ten-
nessee Press, 2001.
Peplow, Michael. George S. Schuyler.Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1980.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too,
Sing America.Vol. 1, 1902–1941.New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.“Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,
The”Langston Hughes(1926)
An influential essay by LANGSTONHUGHESpub-
lished in the June 1926 issue of THENATION,the
influential American political magazine. Freda
Kirchwey, editor in chief, on the recommendation of
JAMESWELDON JOHNSON, solicited Hughes and
asked him to generate an essay on African-American
art. Her request was motivated in part by a just-
published essay in The Nation,“NEGROARTHOKUM”
by GEORGESCHUYLER.
Hughes offered a powerful set of observations
about the prejudice of audiences and patrons who
declared their interest in ethnic art and then disre-
garded works by gifted African-American artists and
performers. He also directed sharp criticism at
African-American artists who believed that they
must transcend race in order to achieve greatness.
After recounting an anecdote in which a young
African-American poet confessed his desire to “be a
poet—not a Negro poet,” Hughes made an emphatic
evaluation of the obstacles to black creative excel-
lence. The racial mountain to which the essay’s title
refers is, according to Hughes, a “mountain standing
in the way of any true Negro art in America” and de-
fined as an “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.”
Hughes, who was enrolled at LINCOLNUNI-
VERSITYin Pennsylvania when he wrote the essay,372 “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The”