James Weldon Johnson

Johnson, James Weldon (1871–1938), song-writer, poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and autobiographer. James Weldon Johnson, much like his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, was a man who bridged several historical and literary trends. Born in 1871, during the optimism of the Reconstruction period, in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was imbued with an eclectic set of talents. Over the course of his sixty-seven years, Johnson was the first African American admitted to the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction; the cocomposer (with his brother John Rosamond) of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the song that would later become known as the Negro National Anthem; field secretary in the NAACP; journalist; publisher; diplomat; educator; translator; librettist; anthologist; and English professor; in addition to being a well-known poet and novelist and one of the prime movers of the Harlem Renaissance.

As the first son of James Johnson and the former Helen Louise Dillet, James Weldon inherited his forebears' combination of industrious energy and public-mindedness, as demonstrated by his maternal grandfather's long life in public service in the Bahamas, where he served in the House of Assembly for thirty years. James, Sr., spent many years as the headwaiter of the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had moved the family after his sponge fishing and dray businesses were ruined by a hurricane that hit the Bahamas in 1866. James, Jr., was born and educated in Jacksonville, first by his mother, who taught for many years in the public schools, and later by James C. Walter, the well-educated but stern principal of the Stanton School. Graduating at the age of sixteen, Johnson enrolled in Atlanta University, from which he graduated in 1894. After graduation, Johnson, though only twenty-three, returned to the Stanton School to become its principal.

In 1895, Johnson founded the Daily American, a newspaper devoted to reporting on issues pertinent to the black community. Though the paper only lasted a year (with Johnson doing most of the work himself for eight of those months) before it succumbed to financial hardship, it addressed racial injustice and, in keeping with Johnson's upbringing, asserted a self-help philosophy that echoed Booker T. Washington. Of the demise of the paper he wrote in his autobiography, Along This Way, “The failure of the Daily American was my first taste of defeat in public life….” However the effort was not a total failure, for both Washington and his main rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, became aware of Johnson through his journalistic efforts, leading to opportunities in later years.

Turning to the study of law, Johnson studied with a young, white lawyer named Thomas A. Ledwith. But despite the fact that he built up a successful law practice in Jacksonville, Johnson soon tired of the law (his practice had been conducted concurrently with his duties as principal of the Stanton School). When his brother returned to Jacksonville after graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1897, James's poems provided the lyrics for Rosamond's early songs. By the end of the decade, both brothers were in New York, providing compositions to Broadway musicals. There they met Bob Cole, whom Johnson described as a man of such immense talent that he could “write a play, stage it, and play a part.”

The brothers split their time between Jacksonville and New York for a number of years before settling in New York for good. However, their greatest composition, the one for which they are best known, was written for a Stanton School celebration of Lincoln's birthday. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a song that, as Johnson put it, the brothers let pass “out of [their] minds,” after it had been published. But the song's importance grew from the students, who remembered it and taught it to other students throughout the South, until some twenty years later it was adopted by the NAACP as the “Negro National Hymn”.

It was this kind of creativity under duress, coupled with his connections in the political sphere, that characterized Johnson's life as an artist and activist. Indeed, between the years 1914 and 1931, his desire to explore the limits of both worlds led him to seek a more thorough synthesis of his public and artistic sensibilities. The study of literature, which Johnson began around 1904 under the tutelage of the critic and novelist Brander Matthews, who was then teaching at Columbia University, caused Johnson to withdraw from the Cole/Johnson partnership to pursue a life as a writer. However, this creative impulse coincided with his decision in 1906 to serve as United States consul to Venezuela, a post that Washington's political connections with the Roosevelt administration helped to secure.

During the three years he held this post, Johnson completed his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912. Though many read the novel as a sociological document, its true value lies in the manner in which it recasts the “tragic mulatto” story within the context of Du Bois's metaphor of the veil. The novel sparked renewed interest when Johnson announced in 1927 that he had authored the book as fiction. Indeed, so great was the public propensity to equate the novel's hero with Johnson himself that Johnson felt obliged to write his autobiography, which appeared in 1933 under the title Along This Way.

He had, by this time, established himself as an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. From his post as field secretary of the NAACP, Johnson was a witness to the changes taking place in the artistic sphere. As a prominent voice in the literary debates of the day, Johnson undertook the task of editing The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926), and writing his survey of African American cultural contributions to the New York artistic scene in Black Manhattan (1930). His own career as a poet reached its culmination in God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927. Though not noted for playing the role of polemicist, through each of these literary enterprises Johnson worked to refute biased commentary from white critics while prodding African American writers toward a more ambitious vision of literary endeavor. It was Johnson's great hope that the contributions of younger writers would do for African Americans, “what [John Millington] Synge did for the Irish,” namely utilizing folk materials to “express the racial spirit [of African Americans] from within, rather than [through] symbols from without… .” Hence Johnson's attempt to discredit Negro dialect, a literary convention characterized by misspellings and malapropisms, which in Johnson's view was capable of conveying only pathos or humor. Though writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling A. Brown would challenge this viewpoint, Johnson's point must be understood within the context of his life as a public figure.

With the arrival of the 1930s, Johnson had seen the NAACP's membership rolls and political influence increase, though the latter failed to produce tangible legislative and social reform in Washington. Retiring to a life as Professor of Creative Literature and Writing at Fisk University, Johnson lectured widely on the topics of racial advancement and civil rights, while completing Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book that argued for the merits of racial integration and cooperation, and his last major verse collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1934). Though he died in a tragic automobile accident while vacationing in Maine in June of 1938, Johnson continues to be remembered for his unflappable integrity and his devotion to human service.

Bibliography

• James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way, 1933; rpt. 1968.
• Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 1973.
• Robert E. Fleming, ed., James Weldon Johnson and Arna Bontemps: A Reference Guide, 1978.
• Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, “Johnson, James Weldon,” in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, ed. Leonard S. Klein, 1982, pp. 517–518.
• Robert E. Fleming, James Weldon Johnson, 1987.
• Joseph T. Skerritt, “James Weldon Johnson,” in African American Writers, eds. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and Valerie Smith, 1991, pp. 219–233.
• Sondra Kathryn Wilson, ed. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, 2 vols., 1995.
• Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver, eds., Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, 1997

Herman Beavers

African American man of letters James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was also a teacher, politician, and lawyer. He is best known for his novel, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", and a book of poems, "God's Trombones".

On June 17, 1871, James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Fla. His father, a restaurant headwaiter, was entirely self-taught; his mother was a musician and school teacher. After taking his bachelor of arts degree at Atlanta University in 1894, Johnson taught in the public school for blacks in Jacksonville. Meanwhile he studied law and helped establish the first daily African American newspaper in his native city.

In 1898 Johnson joined his older brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in New York City. Collaborating with his brother, a skilled musician, he wrote such hits as "Tell Me, Dusky Maiden," "Nobody's Looking but the Owl and the Moon," and "Oh, Didn't He Ramble." Some of Johnson's early poetry was published in the Century and the Bookman. He took his master of arts degree from Atlanta University in 1904.

Returning from a European theatrical tour in 1904, Johnson joined Theodore Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign and was rewarded with the appointment as U.S. consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in 1907. Two years later he went to Nicaragua in this same capacity. There he wrote his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. First published in 1912, the book established Johnson's concern with the social problems that beset black people and his commitment to finding solutions. He had married Grace Nail in 1910.

In 1916 Johnson joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, becoming general secretary in 1920, continued there until 1930. He was a militant crusader for black Americans, demanding political and cultural equality. Though his fight for congressional passage of the Dyer Antilynching Bill was unsuccessful, it stirred the South to action to abolish lynching.

Johnson's Fifty Years and Other Poems was published in 1917, and in 1920 a book on politics, Self-determining Haiti, appeared. He presented the Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922. This was a pioneering anthology, like his Book of American Negro Spirituals, which, with piano arrangements by his brother, appeared in 1925. (The two volumes had their ninth printing in 1964). But the book that brought him national attention as a poet was God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). Here Johnson broke new literary ground by discarding Negro dialect, employing instead the "native idiom of Negro speech" without distortion. Black Manhattan, a kind of memoir, was published in 1930, the year Johnson became professor of creative literature at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. He was also visiting professor of creative literature at New York University from 1934 until his death. His autobiography, Along This Way (1933), went through eight printings in 10 years. His last book, St. Peter Relates an Incident (1935), is a poetic satire on race prejudice.

Johnson won the W. E. B. Du Bois Prize for Negro literature in 1934, the Spingarn Medal twice, and the Harmon Award for distinguished achievement. He died in an automobile accident on June 26, 1938. In 1950 the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters was founded in the Yale University Library.

Further Reading

Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933) is the best factual source. Johnson's Black Manhattan (1930) gives additional material. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P.Davis, and Ulysses Lee, Negro Caravan (1940), and James A. Emanuel and Theodore Gross, eds., Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968), contain brief critical treatment. More extensive treatment is in Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (1939).

Additional Sources

Egypt, Ophelia Settle, James Weldon Johnson, New York, Crowell 1974.

Johnson, James Weldon, Along this way: the autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1990.

civil rights activist; writer; lyricist; lawyer; consul; educator

Personal Information

Born James William Johnson, June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, FL; changed middle name to Weldon, 1913; died of injuries suffered in an automobile accident, June 26, 1938, in Wiscasset, ME; buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY; son of James (a restaurant headwaiter) and Helen Louise (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Dillet) Johnson; married Grace Nail, February 3, 1910.
Education: Atlanta University, A.B., 1894, A.M., 1904; graduate study at Columbia University.
Memberships: NAACP, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, Academy of Political Science.

Career

Poet, novelist, editor, lyricist, civil rights leader, diplomat, lawyer, and teacher. Worked in Jacksonville, FL, as school principal, newspaper editor, teacher, and attorney, 1894-1901; moved to New York City, 1901, and wrote lyrics for musical theater in partnership with brother, John Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole; named U.S. consul to Venezuela, 1906, and to Nicaragua, 1909; retired from foreign service, 1913; writer for New York Age (newspaper), 1914-24; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), New York City, field secretary, 1916-20, executive secretary, 1920-30; professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, Nashville, TN, 1931-38.

Life's Work

James Weldon Johnson's boundless energy and concern for the plight of African Americans combined to produce an extraordinary career. As a poet, journalist, social activist, and educator, Johnson sought new standards for the treatment of blacks in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was simultaneously a mainstream American writer, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a collector of the most poignant songs and poems produced by black Americans prior to 1930. In Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, Jean Wagner called Johnson "doubtless one of the most distinguished and influential personalities the black world has ever known."

Johnson was a "Renaissance man" before the term was popular. He overcame enormous obstacles presented by white prejudice, earning a college degree, becoming certified as a Florida attorney, serving the U.S. government as a consul to foreign nations, and leading the NAACP in its determined opposition to lynchings and to Jim Crow legislation, which legalized segregation. He is also well remembered as a poet and a lyricist whose hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing" became known as the "Negro National Anthem." In his own time, Johnson was admired for his intellectual breadth, self-confidence, and leadership qualities. More than half a century after his death, he is recognized for his original contributions to American letters, his preservation of essential African American songs and poems, and his temperate civil rights agitation. Eugene Levy noted in an essay for Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century: "In both roles [as literary figure and activist] Johnson fought to move beyond the severe constraints set by racial prejudice and discrimination to shape the attitudes and actions of both black and white Americans."

Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida. His parents had moved to the city from the North two years before his birth, and both had found jobs there. Johnson's father worked as the headwaiter at a posh resort hotel, and his mother was a schoolteacher and part-time musician. Young James therefore grew up amidst financial security in a family that stressed the dual goals of hard work and education. Wagner contended that in his home circle, Johnson "learned to avoid both excessive fear of the white man and the tendency to esteem him too highly."

Even in a relatively tolerant city such as Jacksonville, Johnson could only attend the segregated Stanton Central Grammar School where his mother taught. The school was not equipped to teach high school courses, so Johnson was forced to travel to Atlanta, Georgia, to complete his studies. He attended Atlanta University, eventually earning a secondary school diploma and then, in 1894, a bachelor's degree. A decade later, he completed his master's degree at the same institution.

Johnson's mother had encouraged him to enjoy music, so from his childhood onward, he sang, played guitar, and performed songs. In Atlanta he appeared with the Atlanta University quartet, entertaining audiences with spirituals and lighter popular songs of the day. Johnson's involvement with music would eventually broaden his horizons and take him far from the dusty Southern city of his birth.

When Johnson graduated from college, he returned to Jacksonville as a teacher and principal of Stanton, where he began to demonstrate the enormous energy and social consciousness that would mark most of his adult life. First he expanded Stanton's curriculum to include high school studies. Then, in 1895, he founded and co-edited the Daily American, the first black-oriented daily newspaper in America. The venture began bravely but folded after eight months. Nevertheless, the ambitious project--with its agenda of black empowerment--caught the attention of prominent national leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

Meanwhile Johnson decided to study law. With the help of a white attorney in Jacksonville, he prepared to take the Florida bar examinations. When he passed the bar on his first attempt in 1898, he became the first black attorney in the state of Florida since the days of Reconstruction. The last years of the nineteenth century found Johnson teaching, practicing law in Jacksonville, speaking for the black community's interests, and writing poems and songs.

Late in 1899 Johnson was invited to give a speech at a local celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Instead, he wrote a hymn for the occasion, and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, composed the music. Their composition, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," was first performed by 500 Jacksonville school children in February of 1900. The song offers a moving and faithful cry from free blacks for a future of hope in America. Johnson is said to have considered the composition of the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to be the most satisfying accomplishment of his life.

Although Johnson and his brother did little to promote the song at first, it took on a life of its own. Soon it could be heard throughout the South in churches and on festive occasions. By 1920 it was so popular that the NAACP adopted it as a theme song. It was the best-known anthem of black America at least until the 1960s, when civil rights demonstrators popularized "We Shall Overcome."

In 1901, Johnson and his brother left Jacksonville for New York City, where they sought work writing songs for the musical theater. They formed a partnership with Bob Cole and over the next five years composed some two hundred songs for Broadway and burlesque shows. Success came rapidly, and by 1904 the Johnson brothers and Bob Cole were well known in entertainment circles. Shows they had written toured America and Europe, giving them an opportunity to see the world. At home in New York they were minor celebrities. Even during this period, though, Johnson continued more scholarly pursuits. He took graduate courses at Columbia University and wrote poetry, some of it in black dialect, after the manner of his friend and fellow poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Johnson had always been interested in politics. In 1904 he helped to found a Colored Republican Club in New York City, and he worked actively for the election of Republican presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. One of his contributions to the campaign was a spirited song he wrote for Roosevelt. The song--and Johnson's other activities on behalf of the Republican party--strengthened his ties to those in political power. One of Johnson's friends, social activist and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington, helped him to earn an official position with the Roosevelt administration as U.S. consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. Johnson began his duties there in 1906.

With few official chores in his tropical posting, Johnson had plenty of time to write. He completed numerous poems and his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, during his three years in Venezuela. Some of his poetry was published in monthly magazines back in America, and the novel appeared in print without Johnson's name as early as 1912. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a melancholy fictional memoir of a light-skinned black man who reluctantly chooses to "pass" for white after witnessing a brutal lynching in the rural South. Johnson's subject matter was not new, but his story managed to bring depth to its main character and address perplexing moral questions. When the novel was published under Johnson's name in 1922, some people believed it was truly an autobiography. That led the author to write his real life story, Along This Way, in 1933.

In 1909, Johnson was promoted to a consular post in Corinto, Nicaragua. There he found himself in a turbulent political climate that culminated in the landing of United States troops in Corinto in 1912. That same year, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, took office as president. Johnson felt little hope of advancement under the new administration, so he resigned from the civil service in 1913.

He returned to New York City and found a job as editorial writer for the New York Age, a prestigious and well-established black newspaper. According to Levy, "Johnson developed in his early columns a call for action by examining such issues as residential segregation, lynching, and the need for racial pride, making known to his readers that he believed in forthright, explicit protest." Specifically, Johnson urged blacks to use the power of the press as a weapon in the fight for equality. Levy quoted him as having said: "The greatest thing the American Negro gained as a result of the Civil War and the amendments to the Constitution was the right to contend for his rights."

Politically, however, Johnson was a conservative who shunned the notion of black separatist movements. "As much as he extolled black culture and achievements," wrote Levy, "he did not believe blacks could gain both their full rights and economic opportunity without the aid of whites."

That belief would be tested as the years passed. In 1916 Johnson accepted the newly created post of field secretary of the NAACP. His duties included investigating incidents of racial discrimination and organizing new NAACP branches across the country. The organization grew tremendously between 1917 and 1930 and provided a nucleus of opposition to the growing trend toward white supremacist legislation and brutal lynchings.

From 1920 until 1930 Johnson served as the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, replacing white chief executive John R. Shillady, who suffered considerable psychological trauma after being beaten by a mob of bigoted whites in Austin, Texas, because of his work on behalf of blacks. Johnson's deft skills of communication--with both blacks and whites--served him well in his new position. Membership in the NAACP continued to grow, and the organization gained influence in both judicial and legislative arenas. Johnson worked fervently to get a bill passed by the federal government that would end lynching, and he oversaw challenges to Jim Crow laws that moved to the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, for all the advances he made, little actual progress was made for black civil rights in the national halls of justice during Johnson's tenure with the NAACP. In fact, the demise of his federal anti-lynching bill caused him to become disillusioned with the American political system in general and led to his break with the Republican party.

The 1920s proved to be a difficult time for black Americans. The Ku Klux Klan attracted vast membership in the North as well as the South, and "separate but equal" became state law in many places. These setbacks helped to move Johnson toward his more radical political philosophy. From the podium and from the pages of magazines he urged blacks to organize and vote in strength. He continued to call for more and better education for black citizens. Most important, however, he began to use black poetry and song as a means to communicate to the white majority. Wagner stated: "[Johnson's] most eminent services to his race were his labors to make known the cultural achievements of the Negro past. In this way he also had a decisive influence on the development of the Negro Renaissance."

Johnson collected verse in an important work called The Book of American Negro Poetry. Then he turned to spirituals--black Christian hymns, some of them quite old--and published The Book of American Negro Spirituals in 1925 and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals the next year. He encouraged young poets and novelists and was himself identified with the flowering of black creative writing in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. His essays for mainstream periodicals such as the New York Times, Harper's, and the Nation won him the recognition of the leading journalists of the time, including H. L. Mencken and Mark Van Doren.

Johnson's groundbreaking creative work God's Trombones was published in 1927. The book consists of free verse sermons in the style of black evangelistic ministers' discourse, written not in dialect but conventional English. Johnson claimed that God's Trombones was his attempt to preserve an essential artistic form--the black sermon--for future generations of readers. In a review for Phylon magazine in 1960, Eugenia W. Collier wrote of God's Trombones: "The sensitive reader cannot fail to hear the rantings of the fire-and-brimstone preacher; the extremely sensitive reader may even hear the unwritten 'Amens' of the congregation."

In 1930 Johnson retired from his demanding post at the NAACP and took a part-time teaching position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. During the later years of his life, he taught creative writing at both Fisk and at New York University. He also published his autobiography, Along This Way; a serious study of black art and music called Black Manhattan; and another volume of poetry, Saint Peter Relates an Incident. The title poem of the latter work concerns the opening of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Judgment Day. A crowd waits to see the honored but unknown military hero buried there and is astonished when a black man emerges. Johnson wrote the poem in response to unfair treatment accorded the mothers of deceased black soldiers on a nationally sponsored trip to Europe.

Johnson died in 1938 when an automobile in which he was riding was struck by a train in rural Maine. More than 2000 mourners attended his Harlem funeral. He was buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery holding a copy of God's Trombones in his hands.

Throughout his long and busy life, Johnson strove to end discrimination in America. By example and exhortation, he encouraged African Americans to become educated, to express themselves creatively, and to work hard for political power. Above all else, he was a staunch advocate of black pride, empowerment, and self-assertion, but he simultaneously called for interracial communication and cooperation. "Johnson was not the man to throw down the gauntlet to America," wrote Wagner. "He preferred to appeal to its reason and to persuade it that, since blacks and whites are irrevocably destined to live in association, the welfare of one group can only be maintained through assuring the welfare of another."

That idea forms the theme of many of Johnson's poems and songs, especially "Lift Every Voice and Sing." It is one of the many lasting contributions to black America made by James Weldon Johnson, songwriter, poet, civil rights leader, and shining example of advancement against phenomenal odds.

Awards

Spingarn Medal from NAACP, 1925; Harmon Gold Award for God's Trombones; Julius Rosenwald Fund grant, 1929; W. E. B. Du Bois Prize for Negro Literature, 1933. Johnson appeared on a 22-cent postal stamp as part of the "Black Heritage USA" series of the 1970s.

Works

Writings

• The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (novel), 1912, reprinted, Viking Penguin, 1990.
• Fifty Years and Other Poems, Cornhill, 1917.
• (Editor) The Book of American Negro Poetry, Harcourt, 1922, reprinted, 1969.
• (Editor) The Book of American Negro Spirituals, Viking, 1925.
• (Editor) The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, Viking, 1926.
• God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (poetry), Viking, 1927, reprinted, Viking Penguin, 1990.
• Black Manhattan (nonfiction), Knopf, 1930, reprinted, Da Capo, 1991.
• Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, Viking, 1933, reprinted, Viking Penguin, 1990.
• Negro Americans, What Now? (nonfiction), Viking, 1934, reprinted, Da Capo, 1973.
• Saint Peter Relates an Incident (poetry), Viking, 1935.
• Lyricist for numerous songs, including "Lift Every Voice and Sing," 1900, published by Walker and Company, 1993. Contributor to numerous newspapers and magazines.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers, Gale, 1989.
• Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1958.
• Bronz, Stephen H., Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness, Libra, 1964.
• Fleming, Robert E., James Weldon Johnson, Twayne, 1987.
• Franklin, John Hope, An Illustrated History of Black Americans, Time-Life Books, 1970.
• Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, editors, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, University of Illinois Press, 1982.
• Johnson, James Weldon, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson, Viking Penguin, 1990.
• Levy, Eugene, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice, Chicago University Press, 1973.
• Logan, Rayford W., and Michael R. Winston, editors, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, Norton, 1982.
• Smythe, Mabel M., editor, The Black American Reference Book, Prentice Hall, 1976.
• Tolbert-Rouchaleau, Jane, James Weldon Johnson, Chelsea House, 1988.
• Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated from original French by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Periodicals

• Crisis, June 1971.
• Nation, July 2, 1938.
• Newsweek, July 4, 1938.
• New York Times, June 28, 1938, p. 18.
• Phylon, December 1960.
• Time, July 4, 1938.

— Mark Kram

For more information on James Weldon Johnson, visit Britannica.com.

(1871-1938), writer, civil rights leader, and promoter of African-American arts. Johnson was a central figure in the development of African-American cultural and political life during the first part of the twentieth century. He played a major role in articulating goals, devising strategies, and organizing constituencies in the struggle for racial equality. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1894, he forged an amazing patchwork of pursuits into a brilliant career.

Johnson's ideas and actions--often contradictory and inconsistent--reflected his ambivalent, complex personality. A product of the black middle class, he was widely traveled and multilingual. He expanded educational opportunities for blacks in his native Jacksonville, Florida, and taught in Harlem and at Fisk University. His training in law helped prepare him for tours as U.S. consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua (1906-1912) and equipped him for distinguished leadership (1916-1930) in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp).

As naacp field secretary (1916-1920), Johnson worked tirelessly to increase the group's membership and expand its geographic representation, transforming a fledgling interracial civil rights group into a visible, vocal, and credible national force. His investigations of lynchings, peonage, and race riots raised public awareness and won the attention of national leaders. During Johnson's tenure as naacp executive secretary (1920-1930), the organization defined the black agenda largely in legal and political terms, focusing on publicity, lobbying, and litigation in such areas as lynching, criminal justice, and residential segregation.

Johnson rejected both the vocational self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington and the more radical economic measures advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois. He believed that African-Americans could advance their position in American society by demonstrating "intellectual parity . . . through the production of literature and art." Johnson himself helped shape the corpus of African-American literature during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He reached wide interracial audiences with his own poems and edited an important poetry anthology. His monumental God's Trombones--with its unforgettable Aaron Douglas illustrations--epitomized the period's literary and visual energy. Encouraging others, Johnson promoted art competitions and secured major sources of patronage for artists and writers who were black. During his lifetime he founded, edited, and wrote for various influential black periodicals and wrote books and articles on racial topics and contemporary issues. His novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, remains a classic. Its protagonist, a light-skinned black pianist, tragically abandons his dream of creating racially conscious compositions. Succumbing to racism, he passes for white, choosing an artistically compromised but less restricted musical career.

Like his novel's protagonist, Johnson was also a musician. His songwriting spanned popular and high culture. He translated a libretto for the Metropolitan Opera and, collaborating with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, wrote lyrics for Broadway musicals, popular tunes, and comic opera, as well as a song known as the "Negro national anthem," "Lift Every Voice and Sing." During the Harlem Renaissance the brothers published two best-selling collections of traditional spirituals, documenting and spotlighting an overlooked but important American musical tradition. Writing during a period of overtly racist fascination with exotic African stereotypes, they asserted to black and white audiences the cultural legitimacy and vitality of African-American music.

Bibliography:

James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1933; reprint, 1961); Eugene D. Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (1973).

Author:

Linda L. Nieman

See also Harlem Renaissance; Literature; Music; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Johnson, James Weldon, 1871–1938, American author, b. Jacksonville, Fla., educated at Atlanta Univ. (B.A., 1894) and at Columbia. Johnson was the first African American to be admitted to the Florida bar and later was American consul (1906–12), first in Venezuela and then in Nicaragua. In 1930 he became a professor at Fisk Univ., and in 1934 a visiting professor at New York Univ. He helped found and was secretary (1916–30) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), published anonymously, caused a great stir and was republished under his name in 1927. Among his other works are the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing (1900, repr. 1993), which has been called the African-American national anthem, God's Trombones (1927), African-American sermons in verse, and Black Manhattan (1930). He wrote songs with his brother, John Rosamond Johnson.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Along This Way (1933, repr. 1973); study by E. Levy (1973).

(1871-1938)

1912	The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson's novel, published anonymously to lend it greater authenticity as a true story, describes the experiences of a light-skinned black man who can pass for white, which underscore the prejudice and injustice faced by African Americans. The work features one of the most complex psychological characterizations of an African American up to that point. It goes relatively unnoticed, however, at the time.
1917	Fifty Years and Other Poems. In a collection that includes conventional verse forms and dialect poems, the title work surveys racial history in America, with emphasis on the fifty years since emancipation.
1922	The Book of American Negro Poetry. In this landmark poetry collection, Johnson supplies a classic analysis of the contributions of African Americans to American literature. An expanded edition would appear in 1931.
1927	God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Based on his work as editor of the important song collections The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926), Johnson converts rural black folk sermons, remembered from his childhood, into verse. Many consider it to be his greatest poetic achievement.
1930	Black Manhattan. Johnson supplies one of the first cultural studies of black life in New York City from colonial times to the present.
1933	Along This Way. Johnson's influential and acclaimed autobiography traces his career in the wider context of his times and the struggle for civil rights.
1934	Negro Americans, What Now? The author's lectures delivered at Fisk University consider the future for African Americans in the United States, calling for integration.
1935	Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems. Johnson's last major collection includes the satirical narrative title poem, first published in 1930, in which a veterans' group discovers that the soldier in the Tomb of the Unknown is black. It is inspired by the author's outrage at the discrimination experienced by widows of African Americans killed in battle.

James Weldon Johnson was a key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) between 1916 and 1930, and helped transform that organization into the leading African American civil rights advocacy group in the United States. Johnson's efforts as NAACP field secretary greatly increased the number of NAACP branches and members, and his work as executive secretary during the 1920s expanded the association's lobbying, litigation, fund-raising, and publicity campaigns. Johnson was also a highly accomplished writer and played a vital role in the African American literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Johnson was born June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida. His parents, James Johnson and Helen Louise Dillette Johnson, encouraged his pursuit of education, and he graduated from Atlanta University in 1894. He then took a job as principal at the Stanton School in Jacksonville, where he established a high school program.

He studied law with a white lawyer in his spare time, and in 1898 was admitted to the Florida bar. He also wrote lyrics for songs composed by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. In 1900 the two wrote the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which later became known as the "Negro National Anthem." The two brothers moved to New York in 1902 and went on to become a highly successful songwriting team.

Johnson became involved in New York politics. In 1904 he became treasurer of the city's Colored Republican Club, helping with the campaign to reelect Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. On the recommendation of W.E.B. DuBois, an African American scholar and civil rights leader, Johnson was named U.S. consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in 1906. Two years later he was appointed consul to Corinto, Nicaragua. He remained in that position until 1913, when he resigned. Johnson believed that the election of Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, to the presidency, as well as significant racial prejudice, would interfere with his advancement in the consular service. In 1910 he married Grace Nail. The couple had no children.

Johnson returned to New York and in 1914 became an editorialist and columnist at the New York Age newspaper. Two years later he was offered a position as field secretary for the NAACP, which was founded in 1909 to improve the situation of African Americans. In that office Johnson traveled widely and did much to help the NAACP grow from nine thousand members in 1916 to ninety thousand in 1920. Under Johnson's direction the number of branches multiplied rapidly as well. In the South, where NAACP activity had been weak, the number of branches increased from 3 to 131. Johnson also spoke widely on the subject of racial discrimination, and he organized NAACP protests. In 1917 he coordinated a silent march in New York to protest lynching of African Americans and other forms of racial oppression. Throughout his tenure at the NAACP, he remained committed to keeping it an interracial organization, seeking the membership and aid of whites as well as blacks.

By 1920 Johnson had risen to executive secretary of the NAACP, the organization's highest leadership position. Under his guidance the NAACP publicized the continued lynching of African Americans, which the organization estimated had caused the death of three thousand people between 1889 and 1919. Johnson directed the NAACP's support of the 1921 Dyer antilynching bill (which did not become law), labor union movements, and policies to improve living and working conditions for African Americans. In addition, Johnson issued an influential report on the U.S. occupation of Haiti occurring at that time. Furthermore, Johnson was a highly successful fund-raiser.

Johnson's leadership greatly increased the NAACP's influence on U.S. law. He helped expand the organization's campaigns to end laws and practices that segregated African Americans and denied them basic freedoms such as the right to vote. Under Johnson's leadership the NAACP successfully argued Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536, 47 S. Ct. 446, 71 L. Ed. 759 (1927), before the Supreme Court. The decision held that a whites-only Democratic party primary in Texas was unconstitutional, and marked a significant step toward establishing equal voting rights for African Americans.

In 1930 Johnson resigned from the NAACP to become a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, in Nashville. Johnson's writings include The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1913), a novel; three volumes of poetry; Black Manhattan (1930), a history of African Americans in New York; Along This Way (1933), an autobiography; and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a treatise on the situation of African Americans. He edited three influential anthologies: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926), the last two with his brother.

Johnson received much recognition during his lifetime, including honorary degrees from Atlanta University and Howard University and the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (1925). He was killed in a car accident in Wiscasset, Maine, on June 26, 1938.

Quotes:

"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics."

"Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune."

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