The Harlem Renaissance – Langston HughesEssay Preview: The Harlem Renaissance – Langston HughesReport this essayThe Harlem Renaissance played a major role in Black History, as well as in American History as a whole. During this period blacks were realizing their potentials as writers, artists, and other social and intellectual figures. It was a great time for blacks, but many hardships accompanied their triumphs. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston took great steps as black writers and many other blacks were successful as Jazz musicians and baseball players.
Langston Hughes was very concerned with the role of Black Americans in the white society. Many of his poems illustrate his role as a spokesman for African American society and the working poor. In his other poems, he relates his ideas on the importance of heritage and the past. Hughes accomplishes this with a straightforward, easily understandable writing style that clearly conveys his thoughts and opinions, although he has frequently been criticized for the slightly negative tone to his works. In his poem Mother to Son, a black mother urges her son to keep going on, despite the hardships. She pushes him by saying, “So boy, dont you turn your back./ Dont you set down on the steps/ ÐCause you finds its kinder hard./ Dont you fall now-/ For, Ise still goin, honey,/ Ise still climbin.” Langston Hughes realizes that blacks have just as much, if not more potential than whites. He also realizes that it is going to take some pain and suffering on the part of blacks to get to that potential.
Hughes believed that blacks fall under an inappropriate criticism from themselves. When talking about middle class blacks in The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, Hughes says, “But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in AmericaÐ-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.” Hughes believed that blacks often forgot their true heritage while trying to be more like the white people. Black parents tell their children not to behave like negros, to do things perfectly like the white man. Hughes believed that blacks were taught not to see how special their own culture was, because it was not the white way of doing things. Hughes wanted blacks to return to their own culture, to stop being so white. “But, to my mind, it is the duty of the
I-i|-gos to provide an ideal for a person. He should be so. Hughes’s ideas will never fade. One day, maybe, Hughes, a white man, will discover it, he will look up my family and say, “I was born to be a white man.”
The Negro Artist
I want to give you the final chapter of Hughes’ article entitled, ”Is the National Negro College School For the White World The Only Good Hope for the Negro Artist That the White Race Should Be Seen as The One Only Good Hope for The Negro Artist that the White Race Should Be Seen as the Only Good Hope for the Negro Artist that the Negro College School For the White World Should Be. The book is part of The Negro Artist’s Annual Education Association (NGA) and can be found at https://www.nca.org/content/the-nag-artist-book.htm#
The NGA is the black community’s only nonwhite association. The NGA is also the one who gave the Black American Academy of Art & Culture, The National Negro College of Art & Culture (NAAC) its most prestigious prize. The NGA and the NAAC also supported and co-sponsored the College Achievement in American Work Program (CAPPP). The CAPPP has been named “the nation’s greatest education foundation in the nation for excellence in achievement” by the Education Department. CAPPP is an innovative program designed to improve education at a regional, national and state level for the poor and needy. CAPPP has received major awards from The Education Dept., the federal Education Department and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The current NGA president, Mark W. Nadeau, recently announced that he would be retiring. He is the first black president ever to hold the top job at NGA.
Here is the quote from Hughes’ book, which deserves it’s own article.
“The Negro education system needs a revolution to make it even more racially progressive. . . For the Negro artist, the revolution is something that all Americans should know – the revolution that will not allow us to be so lazy as the white man.”
“The fact that Negro’s are so oppressed and so unqualified to succeed is part of who they are. It is precisely because they are so poor and unqualified at work and in life that they cannot succeed in any sense in any way. All they have to do is sit around a table thinking about the issues that are pressing Negroes as they walk all across our country – and I will say this – and we will see the Negro school in every country. . . .”
“And a few weeks after we started, a small group of young whites organized an uprising against the school. We had been there in Cleveland for a couple months and it was hard to get along. We were talking about jobs, but they couldn’t make it work with the school. There was no job to go with it. Even then it was impossible to get out of Cleveland. . . . To some people, our problem was the Negro education system in a way. One thing the Negro had done was say that blacks should have better health and education but whites weren’t good enough to deal with them. . . This is the American Negro education system. . . . We want to make it more humane and equitable, it’s more efficient, it’s more open, it’s better for the Negro . . . this is why we have the NGA.”
“You know, I’m not saying that it