James Weldon Johnson

Born James William Johnson in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 17,1871; he changed his middle name to Weldon in 1913. James, was the son of a headwaiter and the first female black public school teacher in Florida, both of whom had roots in Nassau, Bahamas. He was the second of three children. Johnson's interests in reading and music were encouraged by his parents. Johnson earned an A.B. in 1894 from Atlanta University. He was brought up in a middle-class setting, and for a time shielded from poverty. The summer before he graduated college, James attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois where he visited a celebration called “Colored People’s Day” and heard Fredrick Douglass speak, and heard the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar whom he instantly befriended.

After graduation, Johnson became the principal at the same school in Jacksonville, Florida where his mother had taught. James introduced nineth and tenth grades to the school, thereby improving education with this addition of grade levels. Jackson returned to college and studied law, becoming the first African American to pass the bar exam in the state of Florida. His brother John Rosamond Johnson was a graduate of The New England Conservatory of Music in 1897, where the two began rigorous work on the musical theatre. In 1902, James and his brother moved to New York after James resigned from his educational duties to team with Bob Cole. This partnership was very successful.

The racial tidal waves of the time caused Johnson to further his education and in 1906 he secured a consulship at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, the position allowing him time to write poetry and work on a novel. In 1909 he was transferred to Corinto, Nicaragua, where a year later he married Grace Nail, the daughter of prosperous real estate developer from New York. While still in Nicaragua he finished his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which was published anonymously in 1912 in hopes that readers might think it a factual story. Johnson resigned his consulship in 1913 and returned to the U.S.

After a year in Jacksonville, he moved back to New York to become an editorial writer for the New York Age, he was an ardent champion for equal rights. In 1916, Joel E. Spingarn offered Johnson the post of field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1917 he published his first collection of poetry, Fifty Years and Other Poems, the title poem having received praise when it appeared in The New York Times. Johnson became general secretary of the NAACP in 1920. Even with heavy responsibility and commitment to the NAACP, Johnson found time to assemble three ground-breaking anthologies: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926).

Johnson's second collection of poetry, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, appeared in 1927 and marks his last significant creative endeavor. His administrative duties for the NAACP were proving strenuous, and, after taking a leave of absence in 1929, he resigned as general secretary in 1930. During his final years he wrote a history of black life in New York that focuses on Harlem Renaissance entitled Black Manhattan (1930), his truly autobiographical Along This Way (1933), and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book that argues for integration as the only viable solution to America's racial problems.

Johnson died on 26 June 1938 near his summer home in Wiscasset, Maine, when the car in which he was driving was struck by a train. His funeral in Harlem was attended by more than 2000 people. James Weldon Jonson was indeed a forerunner in American Black Literature.



The University of South Carolina, based on an exhibit by Jamie S. Hansen and Northern Kentucky University, the writings of Jill Diesman with additions by Renee Matthews-Jackson