James Weldon Johnson

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Herman BeaversJohnson, James Weldon (17 June 1871-26 June 1938), civil-rights leader, poet, and

novelist, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of James Johnson, a resort hotel

headwaiter, and Helen Dillet, a schoolteacher. He grew up in a secure, middle-class home

in an era, Johnson recalled in Along This Way (1933), when "Jacksonville was

known far and wide as a good town for Negroes" because of the jobs provided by its

winter resorts. After completing the eighth grade at Stanton Grammar School, the only

school open to African Americans in his hometown, Johnson attended the preparatory school

and then the college division of Atlanta University, where he developed skills as a writer

and a public speaker. Following his graduation in 1894 Johnson returned to his hometown

and became principal of Stanton School.

School teaching, however, did not satisfy his ambitions. While continuing as principal

Johnson started a short-lived newspaper and then read law in a local attorney’s office

well enough to pass the exam for admission to the Florida state bar. He also continued to

write poetry, a practice he had started in college. In early 1900 he and his brother

Rosamond, an accomplished musician, collaborated on "Lift Every Voice and Sing,"

an anthem commemorating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. African-American groups around the

country found the song inspirational, and within fifteen years it had acquired a subtitle:

"The Negro National Anthem."

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" was not the only song on which the brothers

collaborated. In 1899 the two spent the summer in New York City, where they sold their

first popular song, "Louisiana Lize." In 1902 they left Jacksonville to join Bob

Cole, a young songwriter they had met early on in New York, in the quickly successful

Broadway songwriting team of Cole and Johnson Brothers. Over the next few years Johnson

was largely responsible for the lyrics of such hit songs as "Nobody’s Lookin’ but de

Owl and de Moon" (1901), "Under the Bamboo Tree" (1902), and "Congo

Love Song" (1903).

In 1906 Johnson’s life took another turn when, through the influence of Booker T.

Washington, Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In

1909 he moved to a more significant post as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua. A year later he

returned to the United States for a brief stay in New York City, where he married Grace

Nail, a member of a well-established African-American family. They did not have children.

In 1912 revolution broke out in Nicaragua. Johnson’s role in aiding U.S. Marines in

defeating the rebels drew high praise from Washington. He left the Consular Service in

1913; there would be, he felt, little opportunity for an African American in the newly

elected Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson.

Johnson maintained his literary efforts during this period. Several of his poems

(including "Fifty Years," commemorating the anniversary of the Emancipation

Proclamation) appeared in nationally circulated publications. In 1912 he published The

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a novel whose central character, unlike Johnson,

was light enough to "pass" as a white man; the book explores the young man’s

struggles to find his place in American society. Johnson returned to New York City in

1914, and he soon began a weekly column on current affairs for the New York Age, a

widely distributed African-American newspaper.

In 1917 Johnson joined the staff of the interracial National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He worked as field secretary, largely responsible

for establishing local branches throughout the South and for increasing overall membership

from 10,000 to 44,000 by the end of 1918. In 1920 Johnson became the NAACP’s first

African-American secretary (its chief operating officer), a position he held throughout

the 1920s.

Johnson was deeply committed to exposing the injustice and brutality imposed on African

Americans throughout the United States, especially in the Jim Crow South. He labored with

considerable success to put the NAACP on secure financial ground. He spent much time in

Washington unsuccessfully lobbying to have Congress pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,

legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime. Finally, Johnson was a key

figure in making the NAACP a clearinghouse for civil-rights court cases; he collaborated

closely with such noted attorneys as Moorfield Storey, Louis Marshall, and Arthur Garfield

Hayes in a series of cases defending African-American civil rights and attacking the legal

structure of segregation. In all these efforts he worked closely with Walter White, whom

he brought into the NAACP as his assistant and who succeeded him as secretary, and

W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of Crisis, the NAACP monthly journal.

Johnson was probably better known in the 1920s for his literary efforts than for his

leadership of the NAACP. He played an active role, as an author and as a supporter of

young talent, in what has come to be called the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson urged writers

and other artists to draw on everyday life in African-American communities for their

creative inspiration. He played the role of a father figure to a number of young writers,

including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, whose often blunt prose and poetry drew

condemnation from more genteel critics.

His own work during this period included a widely praised anthology, The Book of

American Negro Poetry (1922), a volume that helped to give an identity to the

"New Negro" movement. His continued interest in the African-American musical

tradition found expression in two collections of spirituals that he and Rosamond brought

out: The Book of American Negro Spirituals in 1925 and The Second Book of

American Negro Spirituals in 1926. A year later Johnson published his poetic

interpretation of African-American religion in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in

Verse, a theme he first developed in "O Black and Unknown Bards" (1908). The

year 1927 also saw the reissuing of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

Finally, Johnson published Black Manhattan (1930), the first history of African

Americans in New York City.

In 1931 Johnson stepped down as secretary of the NAACP (though he remained on the

association’s board of directors) to become a professor at Fisk University. For the

remainder of his life he spent the winter and spring terms in Nashville teaching creative

writing and classes in American and African-American literature. The rest of the year the

Johnsons largely spent in New York City. He remained active as a writer, publishing Along

This Way, his autobiography, in 1933 and Negro Americans, What Now?, a work of

social criticism, a year later. Johnson’s unexpected death was the result of an automobile

accident near Wiscasset, Maine.

Johnson took deserved pride in his accomplishments across a wide variety of careers:

teacher, Broadway lyricist, poet, diplomat, novelist, and civil-rights leader. Though he

suffered most of the indignities forced on African Americans during the Jim Crow era,

Johnson retained his sense of self-worth; he proclaimed forcefully in Negro Americans,

What Now? that "My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its

integrity against all the powers of hell." The defense of his "inner life"

did not mean withdrawal, but active engagement. Thus Johnson was a key figure, perhaps the

key figure, in making the NAACP a truly national organization capable of mounting the

attack that eventually led to the dismantling of the system of segregation by law.

Maintaining his "inner life" also led Johnson to write both prose and poetry

that has endured over the decades. "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written a

century ago, can still be heard at African-American gatherings, and the title phrase

appears on the U.S. postage stamp issued in 1988 to honor Johnson. The Autobiography of

an Ex-Colored Man has remained in print since its reissue in the 1920s, and it holds a

significant place in the history of African-American fiction. Along This Way, also

still in print after more than sixty years, is acknowledged as a classic American

autobiography. Finally, God’s Trombones, Johnson’s celebration of the creativity

found in African-American religion, has been adapted for the stage several times, most

notably by Vinnette Carroll (as Trumpets of the Lord) in 1963.

Bibliography

The James Weldon Johnson Papers in the Beinecke Library, Yale University is the single

most important primary source for the study of Johnson’s life. Two other important

manuscript collections are the NAACP Collection and the Booker T. Washington Papers, both

in the Library of Congress. The standard biography is Eugene Levy, James Weldon

Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (1973). A briefer biography is Robert E. Fleming, James

Weldon Johnson (1987). Sondra K. Wilson has edited a two-volume collection, The

Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson (2 vols., 1995), making available much of

his newspaper and magazine work.

Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-02865.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Wed Mar 21 11:29:47 2001

Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University

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