James Weldon Johnson

Author

• Born: June 17, 1871
• Birthplace: Jacksonville, Florida
• Died: June 26, 1938
• Place of death: Wiscasset, Maine

Writer, activist, and educator

One of the most prominent African American leaders of the early twentieth century and a man of remarkably varied achievements, Johnson was an educator, lawyer, newspaper editor, poet, Broadway lyricist, diplomat, novelist, and the first African American executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A prolific man of letters, Johnson is perhaps best known for writing The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man(1912), his classic novel of racial identity, and for cowriting “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (1900), often regarded as the “Negro National Anthem.”

Areas of achievement: Diplomacy; Education; Literature; Music: composition; Poetry; Social issues

Early Life

James Weldon Johnson was born James William Johnson in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. He later changed his middle name because he felt that “Jim Bill Johnson” lacked literary distinction. The second of three children of James Johnson, a hotel waiter from Richmond, Virginia, and Helen Louise Dillet, a schoolteacher from Nassau, Bahamas, Johnson grew up in Jacksonville’s prosperous black middle class. His parents, both born free, emphasized the value of books, art, and music, and encouraged their sons to lead lives of accomplishment and service.

Johnson received his earliest education at Stanton, Jacksonville’s largest black public grammar school; he attended high school and college at Atlanta University. During the summer after his freshman year in college (1891), Johnson taught school in an impoverished African American community in rural Henry County, Georgia, an experience he later described as pivotal in the development of his own race consciousness. Although initially put off by his rustic surroundings, Johnson came to feel a deep sense of racial solidarity with the resilient community in his charge and with African Americans as a whole. As he wrote in his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), “A force stronger than blood made us one.”

After graduating from Atlanta University with honors in 1894, Johnson returned to Jacksonville to serve as principal of Stanton. During his eight-year tenure there, Johnson expanded the school’s curriculum, founded his own short-lived black newspaper, and in 1898 became the first African American to pass the Florida bar exam. He also continued to write poetry, nurturing a talent that he had begun to develop in college. Inspired by the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom he had befriended in 1893, Johnson experimented with poems in African American dialect and standard English; some of these later appeared in his first poetry collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917). In 1900, Johnson and his brother, Rosamond, a musician and performer, cowrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

Drawn to the glamor of his brother’s musical career in New York and weary of the increasing restrictions facing African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Johnson resigned from Stanton in 1902. He moved to New York to pursue a songwriting partnership with his brother and the musician Bob Cole. Over the next four years, Cole and the Johnson brothers became one of the most prolific songwriting teams in Broadway history, composing some two hundred popular songs for many of the era’s leading musicals. In many of their compositions (such as the hits “Congo Love Song” and “Under the Bamboo Tree”), they incorporated race-specific themes that attempted to refine the coarse stereotypes of the period’s popular “coon songs.” While in New York, Johnson also took literature courses at Columbia University under the prominent scholar Brander Matthews and observed the black bohemian nightlife of pre-Harlem Renaissance New York.

Life’s Work

Johnson’s professional life took yet another turn in 1906, when he embarked on a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Thanks in part to his growing involvement in the Republican Party (he and Rosamond had written two songs for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign), Johnson was appointed by Roosevelt to serve as U.S. consul in Venezuela (1906-1909) and Nicaragua (1909-1913). During his time in Latin America, Johnson also worked on the manuscript that became The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). On February 10, 1910, he married Grace Nail, the daughter of a Harlem businessman.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—Johnson’s novel about a light-skinned biracial man who decides to “pass” for white—was published anonymously in 1912 by the Boston firm of Sherman, French, and Company. Despite Johnson’s hope that concealing his authorship would make the book more appealing to a reading public that preferred black autobiography to black fiction, the novel generated only modest sales and few reviews. It was not until 1927, when Alfred A. Knopf reissued the novel at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (with Johnson’s name on the cover and a glowing introduction by white patron Carl Van Vechten), that Johnson’s masterpiece gained recognition as a classic of African American fiction.

Throughout the late 1910’s and 1920’s, Johnson assumed an increasingly public role in the national discourse on race. In 1914, he became an editor of the country’s leading black newspaper, The New York Age, which supported Booker T. Washington’s conservative approach to racial issues. For the next decade, Johnson wrote a weekly column for the paper, using this platform to speak out against racism and to praise African American cultural achievements. Despite his ties to Washington, however, Johnson also was recruited by Washington’s more militant rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, to take a position in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the country’s leading civil rights organization. After working as the NAACP’s field secretary for four years (1916-1920) and expanding the organization’s outreach into the black community, Johnson began a decade-long tenure (1920-1930) as the NAACP’s first black chief executive.

Under Johnson’s leadership, the NAACP, which previously had been a largely white-run organization, enjoyed a significant increase in public visibility. One of Johnson’s chief aims was to combat the era’s epidemic of lynching and racial violence. As field secretary, Johnson helped to lead a silent march of some ten thousand African Americans down New York’s Fifth Avenue on July 28, 1917, to protest violence against African Americans. As executive secretary, he campaigned vigorously for a federal antilynching bill. For Johnson, the lynching issue was political as well as personal: In 1901, he had narrowly avoided being lynched by a white mob in Jacksonville after talking with a light-skinned black woman whom observers regarded as white.

Because Johnson’s leadership of the NAACP coincided with the peak years of the Harlem Renaissance, the combination of his writings and political stature made him an influential figure in the movement. During the 1920’s, Johnson compiled The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), the first major anthology of black poetry, and, with his brother, put out The Book of American Negro Spirituals (two volumes, 1925 and 1926). He also wrote God’s Trombones (1927), a collection of poems in which Johnson used standard English verse to capture the words of the “old-time” black preachers whom he had long admired. These projects evinced Johnson’s ongoing effort to fuse black vernacular materials with more traditional literary forms. In 1930, Johnson published Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York City.

Johnson resigned from the NAACP in 1930 and began teaching creative writing atFisk University the next year. An esteemed writer and public figure, Johnson also lectured regularly at New York University. In 1933, he published his autobiography, Along This Way, followed by the book-length essay Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), an affirmation of the NAACP’s integrationist position. His final collection of poetry, Saint Peter Relates an Incident, appeared in 1935. In 1938, Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven after he was severely injured in an automobile accident near Wiscasset, Maine.

Significance

Johnson stands alongside Du Bois and Washington as one of the most influential racial activists and men of letters of the Jim Crow era. Like Du Bois, he was dedicated to the proposition that artistic achievements could play a decisive role in elevating the status of African Americans. Johnson’s work in art and politics compelled both white and black Americans to recognize the value and complexity of the African American experience. While Johnson was not associated with any rigid political ideology—he steered a middle course between the opposing camps of Du Bois and Washington, enjoying friendly relations with both—his championing of black oral and folk traditions counts as perhaps his most important legacy. At a time when many whites saw African Americans only through the distorting lens of racial stereotype and many middle-class African Americans turned away from spirituals, folktales, and sermons as primitive relics from slavery, Johnson was part of a burgeoning movement to affirm black vernacular materials as vital forms of culture. As a novelist, anthologist, and poet, he sought to preserve, explain, and elevate the creations of those “black and unknown bards” whose songs and sermons could, Johnson felt, serve as the basis for complex works of modern black art. While some questioned Johnson’s assumption that black folk culture was a “lower” form in need of refinement in the first place, Johnson’s work nonetheless inspired younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance—particularly Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston—to push black vernacular forms beyond the outmoded “dialect” tradition and into the modern era.

Bibliography

Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. 1933. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Johnson’s memoir remains an indispensable resource on his life and times.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Johnson’s only novel is available in multiple editions; this version contains an introduction by noted scholar William Andrews.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Writings. Edited by William Andrews. New York: Library of America, 2004. The most authoritative one-volume collection of Johnson’s writings, this book includes numerous previously uncollected editorials and essays.

Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. The first full-length biography of Johnson, Levy’s book is a meticulously researched and well-written analysis of Johnson’s life and career. Part of a black biographical series edited by historian John Hope Franklin.

Somerville, Siobhan B. “Double Lives on the Color Line: ’Perverse’ Desire in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” In Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Somerville analyzes the racial dimensions of Johnson’s novel through the lens of queer theory.

Sundquist, Eric. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. A richly contextualized study of black vernacular materials in Johnson’s novel and novels by Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps.