Nancy Lee sometimes forgot she was colored herself. She stood high in scholarship, played a swell game of basketball, had taken part in the senior musical in a soft, velvety voice, and had never seemed to intrude or stand out, except in pleasant ways so it was seldom even mentioned-her color. She was smart, pretty and brown, and fitted in well with the life of the school. But seldom did her high-school classmates think of her as colored. Nancy Lee Johnson was a colored girl, a few years out of the South. Still, Joe Williams got the prize, was feted by the community’s leading painters, club women, and society folks at a big banquet at the Park-Rose Hotel, and was now an award student at the Art School-the city’s only art school. In fact, it was hard to make out there was a bridge until you had looked at the picture a long time. Last year nobody had expected Joe Williams to win the Artist Club scholarship with that funny modernistic water color he had done of the high-level bridge. The thrilling news did not come directly to Nancy Lee, but it came in little indirections that finally added themselves up to one tremendous fact: she had won the prize! But being a calm and quiet young lady, she did not say anything, although the whole high school buzzed with rumors, guesses, reportedly authentic announcements on the part of students who had no right to be making announcements at all-since no student really knew yet who had won this year’s art scholarship.īut Nancy Lee’s drawing was so good, her lines so sure, her colors so bright and harmonious, that certainly no other student in the senior art class at George Washington High was thought to have very much of a chance. What do we learn about her from her picture, which “had come out of her soul, her own life”? What, to begin with, are her attitudes toward her country and toward her race? Has it changed by the end? What do you think of Miss O’Shay’s speech to Nancy Lee, and can her story about the Irish become Nancy Lee’s? Is Nancy Lee’s hope at the end unrealistic? Has the move North been in vain? Is color-blindness a possible or desirable prospect in America-for blacks? For whites? For everyone? If racial prejudice is at odds with the American Dream, what about racial pride and racial preferences? In this story (published in 1941), celebrated poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes (1902–67) describes such an incident in the life of a talented and proud American high school student, Nancy Lee Johnson, whose family had moved from the Deep South to the North so that she might have better opportunities.ĭescribe Nancy Lee. Urn:oclc:471738383 Republisher_date 20120303190317 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120303083435 Scanner in the not-officially-segregated North, there was often a wide gulf between the color-blindness of the American dream and the racial discrimination in daily life, which, early in their lives, crushed the aspirations and dashed the hopes of promising young black Americans. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 22:30:47 Boxid IA174901 Boxid_2 CH110201 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 5.
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