: In his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain , Langston Hughes advocated for Black artists to express their "individual dark-skinned selves" without fear or shame, rejecting both white expectations and Black middle-class pressures to be "respectable" [14, 17]. Origins & Linguistic Shift

: Figures like James Weldon Johnson argued that the "final measure" of a people's greatness was the art and literature they produced, urging Black creators to demonstrate "intellectual parity" through their work [3].

A modern scholarly look at early Black authorship and "failed" literary projects [1, 10].