The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

At several key points in his essay, Hughes inserts descriptive anecdotes to strengthen his arguments. These anecdotes are positioned to convince a resistant reader to understand Hughes’s perspective. In particular, the anecdotes offer a number of details that illustrate aspects of Black life that might seem far away or irrelevant to people who don’t share Hughes’s beliefs about the possibility of a new kind of Black art. Hughes provides these anecdotes in order to bring his argument to life.

The first two anecdotes, in the introductory paragraphs of the work, serve to present Hughes’s thesis: Hughes describes a young Black poet who wants to be White, then follows the profile with a detailed description of the poet’s home life. In the longer of the two anecdotes, Hughes describes a Black middle-class family: “smug, contented, respectable folk... [who] read white papers and magazines” (Paragraph 2). In this home, Hughes articulates, “the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues” (Paragraph 2). Through the narrative, Hughes paints a picture of a Black artist who lives in close proximity to Whiteness; the anecdote presents the argument that “one sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people” (Paragraph 2). By guiding the reader to “see” the difficulty, Hughes reveals his intent behind the anecdote. Hughes would like any potential reader to understand how Black assimilation of White values can significantly impact a Black artist’s ability to love themselves and to represent pride in art.

Though other anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the text, one of the most often cited examples comes in the middle of the essay, as Hughes describes a “prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia” (Paragraph 6) who employs a White woman to sing folksongs but refuses to employ a Black woman to do the same. This anecdote, which references a real event at the time, is employed to support one of Hughes’s critical points: Black artists face significant censure from both White audiences and Black audiences. Throughout the essay, anecdotes like these unpack some of the complex ways that racism, both external and internalized, impacts Black artists.