The Manifesto in The Nation: Hughes and the Racial Mountain

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In June 1926, The Nation published a short essay by a twenty four year old poet that has been read ever since as the closest thing the Harlem Renaissance produced to a founding manifesto. The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain was itself a direct answer to a fellow poet's worry, voiced one week earlier in the same magazine by George Schuyler in The Negro-Art Hokum, that Black writers were becoming too preoccupied with racial subject matter and should aim instead for a raceless, universal art. Hughes's answer was that the wish to escape one's own subject was itself the mountain the essay named: an internalized embarrassment, cutting across class lines within Black America as much as it ran between Black and white audiences, about whether Black life as it was actually lived, in Harlem's streets, its churches, its cabarets, was fit material for serious art at all. His famous closing line, that younger Black artists intended to express their individual dark skinned selves without fear or shame, and that if white people were pleased he was glad and if they were not it did not matter either, was less a rejection of white readers specifically than a rejection of any audience's veto over what counted as legitimate subject matter. The essay did not end the argument inside the movement, it set terms the Harlem Renaissance argued within for the rest of the decade.