How does the poem both celebrate and criticize American history?

What is the effect of Johnson shifting between the terms “Negro,” “colored,” and “Aframerican”?

How would you describe the tone of the poem ?

Are the characters in the story fully formed, three-dimensional characters or flat stereotypes (racial or gender)?

What is the subject of this illustration? Literally, what is being depicted?

Fauset writes: “The satisfied ambition of maturity is a foil for the restless despair of youth” (para. $3$). Does she indicate that race exacerbates this conflict or that it is the result of generational gaps exclusively? Explain.

How does Hughes use the terms “Negro,” “colored,” and “black”? Explain why he uses each when he does.

How does the form of the poem — repetition, rhyme, line breaks — reinforce its meaning?

What are the three apparitions that appear to Macbeth?

Fauset focuses on intracommunity issues related to gradations of skin color, but how does she emphasize the origin of those conflicts in the larger society?

A sentence using the word scourge.

As the novel proceeds, Angela becomes estranged from her family as she chooses the material advantages of “passing” as white. What evidence do you have in this short opening excerpt that Fauset recognizes the alienation that results from such a divided self ? Consider such passages as: “Color or rather the lack of it seemed to the child the one absolute prerequisite to the life of which she was always dreaming” (para. $7$) and “the heritage of her mother’s fair skin” (para. $7$).

Sighet definition.

What does Hughes mean when he writes, “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose” (para. $8$)?