Mrs. A. E. Johnson
Amelia E. Johnson, known as Mrs. A. E. Johnson, was a significant figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly recognized for her contributions to literature and her role as a civil rights advocate. Born in the late 1850s in Montreal, she moved to Maryland with her mother after her father’s death, where she began her career as a schoolteacher. Johnson married Reverend Harvey Johnson, a former slave who became an influential black Baptist leader in Maryland, actively participating in important civil rights efforts.
In the late 1880s, she entered the publishing world, editing publications like The Joy and a children's magazine called The Ivy, where her well-known story "Nettie Ray's Thanksgiving Day" was first published. Johnson advocated for equal opportunities in literature, asserting that African American writers should not be confined to specific narratives or publishing houses. Her writing often reflected traditional gender roles yet also highlighted the struggles women faced in achieving their domestic aspirations.
Johnson's works reached broader audiences through white presses, although she maintained a focus on independence as part of her racial legacy. She passed away in 1922 in Baltimore, coinciding with the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, indicating her lasting influence on African American literature and civil rights.
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Subject Terms
Mrs. A. E. Johnson
Fiction Writer
- Born: 1858
- Birthplace: Canada
- Died: March 29, 1922
- Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland
Biography
Amelia E. Johnson was born in the late 1850’s and grew up in Montreal. When her father died in 1874, she and her mother moved to her mother’s homeland of Maryland where to make ends meet. Here, the still-teenage Johnson took a job as a schoolteacher.
Three years later, she wed the Reverend Harvey Johnson. Born a slave, he became one of the most influential black Baptists in the entire country, gaining so much support for the emerging faith that his church was said to have the largest congregation of any black Baptist church in the state of Maryland. Much more than a preacher, Reverend Johnson aided a member of his church in becoming the first African American admitted to the Maryland Bar Association and participated in a number of civil rights actions, such as the Niagara Convention and founding the Brotherhood of Liberty in his home state.
A. E. Johnson entered the publishing world sometime in the late 1880’s, editing The Joy and a children’s magazine called The Ivy. It around this time that she became somewhat renowned for her practical story entitled “Nettie Ray’s Thanksgiving Day.” That work, about a young girl who learns to count her blessings and discovers the true meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday, was first published in The Ivy but later reprinted in the white-owned National Baptist.
This early success that transcended race appears to have not mattered so much to Johnson as her own financial and literary standing. When later works of hers were rejected by another white publication, Youth’s Companion, Johnson wrote an editorial in New York Age about African American literature and her contention that blacks need not have any unique literature, since even Shakespeare borrowed ideas, but rather ought to have the same opportunities as whites, even though they didn’t have to be under the same publishing houses. Eventually, her novels would reach white presses, those of the American Baptist Publication Society, but her insistence on independence remains her racial legacy.
Her novels themselves, once thought to be unimportant because they never dealt with racial conflict, tied in with the domestic tradition of the era promoting traditional gender roles and the subservience of women. Although her characters are white and their lives somewhat idealized, Johnson does convey some of the hardships facing women in achieving their domestic goals and offers some possible solutions for these issues.
Religion, which played a tremendous role in her life as a preacher’s wife, crossed over into her writing, particularly in The Hazeley Family, which details the spiritual transformations of ordinary household servants and underlings. A. E. Johnson passed away in 1922 in Baltimore, just as the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps in some part the fruit of her labors, was beginning.