I Wanna Read, Let me Read

Here I recommend you the best book I've found about African-American culture and the essay Langston Hughes wrote in the 1920s.

 

The African-American Experience

By Kai Wright

This amazingly useful (and huge) book composes of the best speeches, letters, songs, poems, stories and editorials about black history and culture. Its editor, Kai Wright, masterly selects pieces of black American culture like real slaves’ recordings, Frederick Douglass’s writings or Countee Cullen’s poems and of white American people about African-Americans. Personal experiences, like a Katrina’s survivor’s or a Free Negro’s give a new sentimental dimension to the book. Poems, stories and songs help to make it more entertaining and artistic. Speeches of great black figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. or Muhammad Ali just knock you down.

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

By Langston Hughes

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.” This sentence summarizes perfectly Hughes’s writing. It was written as a response to Countee Cullen’s rebellion against the notion of “Negro poet”. In this essay Hughes rejects any suggestion or assistance from white benefactors because he thinks that black people are able to talk not only about their good aspects but also about their sometimes ugly reality. Those who are interested in black culture must read this essay, as Hughes is the most outstanding figure in Harlem Renaissance, i.e. the black Cultural Revolution in the early 20^th century.  Read it completely here: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain