The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-text review, unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. What literary element is Hughes employing when he begins his essay with the story about the younger Black poet?

A) Anecdote

B) Rhetorical question

C) Juxtaposition

D) Allusion

2. Which passage best connects to the theme of The Tension Between Work and Creativity?

A) “These common people are not afraid of spirituals.”

B) “The whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds.”

C) “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”

D) “A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb.”

3. What literary device does the mountain exemplify?

A) Setting

B) Personification

C) Motif

D) Hyperbole

4. What do Hughes’s descriptions of middle-class and upper-class Black families have in common?

A) The fathers’ professions

B) The desire to emulate whiteness

C) The families’ church affiliations

D) The parenting styles

5. What does the phrase “pain swallowed in a smile” describe in Paragraph 12?

A) Perseverance

B) Creativity

C) Religion

D) Jazz

6. Which of the following best describes Hughes’s reaction to his encounter with the Philadelphia clubwoman?

A) Disgust

B) Pity

C) Anger

D) Confusion

7. What does the tom-tom best represent?

A) The struggle for racial equality