28 pages • 56-minute read
One Friday Morning
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Background
Historical Context: The Great Migration
Between the two world wars, an estimated 3 million African Americans relocated from the American South to Northern cities, among them Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and New York—a period often collectively referred to as “The Great Migration.” Black families, eager to find work and provide for themselves away from the oppressive realities of the Jim Crow South, established communities of color within these cities, such as Harlem in upper Manhattan, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Vine Street area in Kansas City. These communities-within-communities became enclaves of Black culture, defined by family, church, and neighbors.
The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and artistic movement led by Black artists during the 1920s, was born in one of these communities that grew up in the wake of the Great Migration. Harlem became a hub for African American visual artists, musicians, dancers, playwrights, and authors to create work that inspired a generation of Black creatives and has influenced creative expression in all mediums up to the present day.
Hughes positions Nancy Lee’s personal artistic journey within the context of this period. As she outlines her acceptance speech for the scholarship, she reflects proudly on her family’s roots, moving from the sparsely populated rural Deep South to this sprawling Northern city knowing no one. She wants to describe how she, an African American, came to be part of a large white urban high school.
In the six years since Nancy Lee’s family moved to the city, she’s become a vital part of her school, a star basketball player, a featured singer in the glee club, and an exceptional student. As she confides in her art teacher, she feels that she’s found her place.
She contrasts her experience in the city with her family’s life in the rural South where they struggled against limited economic opportunities, institutionalized discrimination, and the routine indignities of racism. In the city, her family has finally found opportunity and feels hopeful. Her father works in the post office, and the family has found a comfortable middle-class niche. Nancy Lee notes that there are times when she has to remind herself that she’s a student of color in a white high school.
Throughout “One Friday Morning,” Hughes emphasizes that the Great Migration did not resolve America’s problems with race relations. As Nancy Lee’s experience reveals, Northern cities were also rife with systemic and interpersonal racism, intolerance, and bigotry. That Nancy Lee resolves in the end to dedicate her young life to being part of the solution reveals Hughes’s own hope that Black families in league with compassionate and tolerant whites will work toward the ideal espoused in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance: of one nation under God.
Literary Context: Social Realism
Hughes closes his story with an affirmation of America not because of what it is but despite what it is. Instead of ending the story with Miss O’Shay delivering the news that Nancy Lee will be denied the scholarship, the story closes with Nancy Lee summoning the courage and resilience to join in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, an affirmation of the grand promise of America itself. Had Hughes ended the story with Miss O’Shay “turn[ing] her back [on Nancy Lee] and [looking] out the window at the spring tulips in the school yard,” the message would have been clear: Nancy Lee, the gifted African American artist, has been denied opportunity due to entrenched racism and white supremacy. However, Nancy Lee refuses to give in to despair, cynicism, or anger.
With this ending, Hughes reflects the agenda of social realism, a literary genre that emerged during the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression when Americans grappled with the concept of the American Dream— economic opportunity and the reward of hard, honest labor—in the face of increasing hardship, joblessness, poverty and hunger. The work of American writers in this period reflected the reality of this new America to reveal the pull of the American Dream and how distant it now seemed. Social realism is the umbrella term used to define this generation of artists—painters, photographers, filmmakers, authors and journalists whose work engaged with this American tension.
Most familiar to contemporary audiences from the novels of John Steinbeck (such as The Grapes of Wrath), the black and white photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, the films of John Ford and Frank Capra, and the nonfiction of Anzia Yezierska and James Agee, social realism exposed America’s flaws while at the same time celebrating its centuries-old promise and refusing to abandon faith in its people. As a result of their work, many of these writers, Hughes included, would be accused of being anti-American and Communist sympathizers during the blacklisting era of the 1950s. But as “One Friday Morning” shows, and social realism itself espouses, if America has problems, its people, heroic and resilient, are the solution.
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