The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” In (1926) was a short essay written by poet Langston Hughes for The Nation magazine. It became the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance. In it Hughes said that black artists in America should stop copying whites, that they will never create anything great that way. Instead they should be proud of who they are, proud to be black, and draw from black culture. Not “white is right” but, as we would now say, “Black is beautiful”.
