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African American Literature and the Struggle for Freedom

So they get angry and despise it and try to change or modify themselves in a way that they may find acceptance. On the one hand, the Black artist is saddled with the burden of trying to fit into the concept of Caucasian America, but on the other hand, lays a second category of Black artists. These ones are not afraid to be true to themselves or to abide by the rules of the world in their definition of what he or she should do with and to their art. This is the truly liberated artist who translates their beauty in the only way they know black people.
             As exhilarating as this may sound the mountain they had to climb to receive acceptance the way they were was a very steep one. There is the story of the Negro clubwoman who would readily shelve out her money to hear Raquel Meller sing but would not want to be seen doing the same for a black artist like Clara Smith who sang Negro folksongs. This is just one of the hurdles black artists that remained as black as they were faced with respect to their jobs and art. Their people tried not to identify with their art and the white people outright ignored it.
             Russell Simmons, when he was a guest on the Arsenio Hall talk show made an interesting observation about the artistic responsibility of the African American artist. He said the fight between freedom of expression and one's social or political responsibility to their community was one that still plagued the African American. The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain understood this conflict. Hughes called out on those African Americans artists that were suppressing their authentic expression as "nordicism Negro intelligentsia" He showed his disdain for the African American creative artists who hid their individual and cultural experiences in a bid to produce an almost white form of art. Their desire to strip their art of every black experience contributed to the death of the Harlem Renaissance.


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