Summary
Hughes explains that most of his own work is racial in its composition and content. He takes his inspiration from jazz music, explaining that he perceives jazz as "one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America" (12). He thinks of jazz as a challenge to the relentless pressures of white culture and hegemony, the same hegemony that people like the Philadelphia clubwoman were taught to idolize and aspire to. Instead, Hughes wants artists and Black citizens alike to recognize the beauty of Blackness for itself.
Hughes says that he is ashamed of the Black artists who emulate white works of art, who choose to paint sunsets rather than Black faces because he "fears the un-whiteness of his own features" (13). Instead, Hughes welcomes the potential for the work of current Black artists to penetrate this "mountain" of prejudice and inspire Black people of all classes. He imagines the possibility of Black artists expressing themselves "without fear or shame," arguing that even if people are displeased, the work of these artists will be seminal for the celebration of Black life in the future (14).
Analysis
As the essay comes to a conclusion, Hughes transitions from discussing the work of others to turning inward and thinking about his own writing. Notably, in his discussion of his own work that is "racial in theme and treatment," Hughes cannot help thinking about the influence of jazz music (11). Hughes perceives jazz as a beacon of hope, an element of Black life that actively works to encapsulate the Black experience and simultaneously present a challenge to white influence through the medium of music. That Hughes holds jazz music in such high regard dramatizes his vision for more successful and skilled Black artists to come. What he subtly envisions through his praise of jazz is a Black artistry that is fundamentally interdisciplinary—Black literature that models itself on jazz music, Black theater that models itself on Black visual art, etc. Notably, this notion of artists working among the disciplines was indeed taken up by future Black artists like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
Despite the gentle polemic of the essay, Hughes concludes "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" on a hopeful and defiant note. He once again turns to jazz, imagining that the music, in all its power, could penetrate the self-imposed barrier of upper-class Black citizens and remind them, joyfully, of the beauty of their own race. But this fantasy is not, in actuality, what Hughes envisions as "success" for Black art. Instead, his vision for the "Negro artist" of the future is much more personal: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" (14). At the end of the essay, then, Hughes divorces Black art from the judgments of both white and upper-class Black citizens, suggesting that Black artists of twentieth-century America will create for themselves and for their communities rather than for critics and nay-sayers. This empowered artistic mode is for Hughes what will render artists victorious over the "mountain" of racial prejudice, so that they may be "free within ourselves" (14).
