Published 80 years after the Emancipation Proclamation legally ended slavery, “One Friday Morning” emphasizes the ongoing reality of racial discrimination in Hughes’s America. Hughes sets the stages by establishing the coming-of-age arc of his protagonist from innocence to experience. Raised in a loving and stable family, Nancy Lee has never questioned her racial identity. Her parents, to her, are Americans, “simple ordinary people who had worked hard and steadily,” proud of their racial identity, and proud of their country as well. Nancy Lee’s life exists far from the American South where her parents grew up. She attends one of the city’s largest high schools where she is one of the few Black students. She admits it seldom occurs to her that she is in fact a student of color. She excels on the basketball court; she adds her “soft, velvety” voice to the school’s choir; she earns high grades in her classes. Under the encouragement of her art teacher, she aspires to be a painter and explore the world through her own perspective.. 

Through Nancy Lee’s creative ambition, Hughes establishes the central tension of the story: As a talented and ambitious Black woman coming of age in an America still very much governed by institutionalized racism, how will Nancy Lee come to terms with that element of her reality? The loss of the scholarship brings Nancy face-to-face with the reality of discrimination.