One Friday Morning

First published in 1941, “One Friday Morning” was written by Langston Hughes (1901-1967), one of the key figures that created and defined the Harlem Renaissance, the celebration of African American life and culture centered in New York City during the 1920s. 

In “One Friday Morning,” Hughes tells the story of a talented African American high school senior, Nancy Lee Johnson, who attends a large, predominantly white high school in a Midwestern city, most likely Chicago. Nancy Lee aspires to be an artist. When one of her paintings wins a prestigious scholarship competition to the city’s only art school, she struggles to understand why that scholarship is almost immediately rescinded over the committee’s anxieties about awarding such an important prize to a student of color. 

Hughes, one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance, had long chronicled the indignities and emotional hardships as well as the joys and triumphs of Black families who migrated north at the turn of the century to seek economic opportunities and to escape the oppressive legacy of Jim Crow in the American South. These families came to find, as Nancy Lee does, that the North was hardly free of discrimination and prejudice. “One Friday Morning” centers on Nancy Lee’s coming to terms with that hypocrisy—the American Dream does not yet include all Americans. Hughes, however, rejects despair. He records Nancy Lee’s heroic courage and her quiet resilience in the face of discovering the hard reality of injustice and discrimination. 

The story first appeared in a special Independence Day issue of Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Begun in 1910, the magazine remains the longest continuously published magazine focused on the political, cultural, and social life of African Americans. 

Like Nancy Lee’s award-winning watercolor painting of a city park, the story recreates a recognizable world with realistic characters, forsaking the experimental techniques that defined Modernism. In preparing her acceptance speech, Nancy Lee shares the background of her family, but the story primarily focuses on the four days between the Tuesday morning that Nancy Lee wins the award and the Friday morning when she understands she will be denied it. The compactness of the storyline adds to the impact of the news, emphasizing the jolt as Nancy Lee goes from euphoria to disappointment and then rallies to affirmation and hope. 

Although Hughes writes the story from a third-person point of view, Nancy Lee’s perspective controls the action.  As the story opens, we meet Nancy Lee, who attends the city’s largest high school with more than 3,000 students. A dedicated student, she has “fit in well with the life of the [predominantly white] school” to the point that sometimes she “forgot she was colored” (2).  

Miss Dietrich, her art teacher, encourages her interest in painting and convinces her to submit one of her paintings to a competition for the Artist Club Scholarship to the city’s prestigious art school. The academy’s tuition is out of reach for Nancy Lee’s family; the scholarship will give her the best opportunity to follow her dream. 

Nancy Lee submits her landscape of a city park on a spring afternoon. In the corner, an “old Negro woman” on a bench enjoys the day— “its charm [is] that everything [is] light and airy” (3). Nancy Lee worries that the painting is not hip enough, that she has not experimented with trendy non-representational art but rather captured the world she sees every day. 

On a rainy Tuesday morning, Miss O’Shay, the kindly, elderly vice-principal, summons Nancy Lee to her office. Nancy Lee fears she has done something wrong, but Miss Dietrich is there, and Miss O’Shay tells her that her park-scape won the competition. Nancy Lee receives the news with tearful joy. The award, Miss O’Shay tells Nancy Lee, will be announced that Friday at the school’s senior recognition assembly. She encourages Nancy Lee to prepare a thank you speech. 

Miss Dietrich suggests Nancy Lee share her family’s experience, how her father, a postal employee, moved her family up North to give Nancy Lee a “chance to go to school” free of the discrimination of the segregated South (5). The family now lives in a “modest Negro neighborhood,” neither rich nor poor. 

As she dances her way home, Nancy Lee reflects on being a student of color and winning the scholarship. She’s proud of her African heritage and happy that she lives in an America where she can realize her dreams. 

Friday morning, Nancy Lee gets ready for the assembly and convinces her mother to attend, saving the scholarship announcement as a surprise. As she dresses, Nancy Lee realizes how this scholarship will change her life. She rehearses her carefully memorized “short speech of gratitude” (6). The speech reflects the magnitude of the scholarship and the opportunity it will give her. “You have given me a chance,” she will say, “and have helped me along the road I wanted to follow ” (6). She closes by saying that they have given her nothing less than the “American dream” (6). As the first student of color to win the award, she realizes what this award will mean to the other minority students. 

Nancy Lee arrives at the school with her mother. After the traditional parent-student breakfast, Miss O’Shay summons Nancy Lee to her office. Miss O’Shay, obviously distressed and uneasy, tells Nancy Lee that the committee, having realized that the award recipient is a Black student, has decided not to award the scholarship to her, fearing a backlash. Miss O’Shay notes that “When the committee learned that [Nancy Lee was] colored, they changed their plans” (8). There have never been any Black students at the city’s art academy. The committee’s letter is succinct and firm, asserting: “We have high regard for the quality of Nancy Lee Johnson’s talent, but we do not feel it would be fair to honor it with the Art Club award” (8). 

Nancy Lee feels devastated. Miss O’Shay assures her that she is embarrassed and outraged by the committee’s action. She pleads with Nancy Lee not to let this setback deter her from pursuing her dreams. Discrimination and prejudice, she tells the girl, have always been part of the American democratic experiment. After all, her people, the Irish, faced outrageous indignities and outright discrimination for generations. Democracy, she says, is evolutionary. The struggle is ongoing: “We still have in this world of ours, democracy to make” (9). 

Nancy Lee sees in Miss O’Shay the nobility and courage that have always defined those who “stand against ignorance, narrowness, hate, and mud on the [flag’s] stars” and feels her “hurt spirit” revive (9). She lifts her head and smiles. “There will be other awards”  she thinks, other opportunities in other cities (9). She will fight to ensure that things like this unfair decision will never happen to any other girls of color. Together the two head to the auditorium. 

As she takes her place among the other seniors, Nancy Lee joins them in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. She resolves in her heart to do what she can to make America truly “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” (10).