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really knew yet who had won this year’s art scholarship.

But Nancy Lee’s drawing was so good, her lines so sure, her colors so bright and
harmonious, that certainly no other student in the senior art class at George Washington
High was thought to have very much of a chance. Yet you never could tell. Last year

nobody had expected Joe Williams to win the Artist Club
scholarship with that funny modernistic watercolor he had
What you Think?ou Think?
done of the high-level bridge. In fact, it was hard to make What y
out there was a bridge until you had looked at the picture Who had won the
a long time. Still, Joe Williams got the prize, was feted by scholarship last year ?

the community’s leading painters, club women, and society
folks at a big banquet at the Park-Rose Hotel, and was now
an award student at the Art School—the city’s only art school.

Nancy Lee Johnson was a colored girl, a few years out of the South. But seldom did her
high-school classmates think of her as colored. She was smart, pretty, and brown, and
fitted in well with the life of the school. She stood high in scholarship, played a swell

game of basketball, had taken part in the senior musical in a soft, velvety voice, and
had never seemed to intrude or stand out except in pleasant ways, so it was seldom
even mentioned—her color.

Nancy Lee sometimes forgot she was colored herself. She liked her classmates and her
school. Particularly she liked her art teacher, Miss Dietrich, the tall red-haired woman
who taught her law and order in doing things; and the beauty of working step by step

until a job is done; a picture finished; a design created; or a block print carved out of
nothing but an idea and a smooth square of linoleum, inked, proofs made, and finally
put down on paper—clean, sharp, beautiful, individual, unlike any other in the world,
thus making the paper have a meaning nobody else could give it except Nancy Lee.
That was the wonderful thing about true creation. You made something nobody else on
earth could make—but you.

Miss Dietrich was the kind of teacher who brought out the best in her students—but

their own best, not anybody else’s copied best. For anybody else’s best, great though it
might be, even Michelangelo’s, wasn’t enough to please
Miss Dietrich, dealing with the creative impulses of young
What you Think?ou Think?
men and women living in an American city in the Middle
West, and being American. What y

Nancy Lee was proud of being American, a Negro Who was Nancy Lee?

American with blood out of Africa a long time ago, too
many generations back to count. But her parents had taught
her the beauties of Africa, its strength, its song, its mighty rivers, its early smelting of
iron, its building of the pyramids, and its ancient and important civilizations. And Miss

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