Consider This Quote: Langston Hughes On Audacity

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.

If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we will stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

— Langston Hughes, American poet, novelist and civil rights activist (quote from the essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain published in "The Nation" [16 June 1926])