James Weldon Johnson
Prominent civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson was born on June 17, 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida. He was brought up in a liberal environment where his parents encouraged him to acquire an education and pursue his dreams. His mother taught him and his brother the works of classical literature as well as music. After finishing high school in 1889, Johnson took admission in Clark Atlanta University from where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1894. Johnson taught for two summers in a rural area of Georgia while attending college. These summer experiences helped Johnson realize how poverty and racism affected many African-Americans.
Johnson then returned to his hometown to work as the principal of the Stanton School. He was only 23 years old at the time. While working as a principal, Johnson established the Daily American, a newspaper dedicated to informing African-Americans in Jacksonville of various social and political issues of concern. However, the lack of editorial staff, as well as financial troubles, forced Johnson to stop publishing the newspaper. However, it helped him to establish his presence in society and brought him into the notice of eminent personalities such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
In 1896, Johnson began to study law in Thomas Ledwith’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1898, he was admitted to the Florida Bar, becoming the first African American admitted to the Florida Bar. He established a successful practice in Jacksonville while his brother, Rosamond, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. While balancing his dual career as principal and lawyer, Johnson found time to write poetry and songs, achieving success with the composition of around 200 songs for Broadway.
The partnership of James Weldon Johnson, Bob Cole of Atlanta and Rosamond Johnson became one of the most influential song composition and musical show writing teams in New York in the early twentieth century. These men elevated the "Negro Songs" from music that promoted negative stereotypes of African Americans to sophisticated tunes that were used in Broadway musicals. Along with his brother, he produced such hits as "Tell Me, Dusky Maiden" and "Nobody's Looking but the Owl and the Moon".
Not long after, in 1900 after return trip to Florida with his brother, they were asked to write a celebratory song in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The product, a poem set to music, became “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. The song testifies to the trials, the triumphs, and the underlying patriotism of African American civilians. Various African-American groups throughout the country found inspiration in the song’s words and used it for special events. By 1915, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) proclaimed that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was the Negro National Anthem.
In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. And in 1909 he became consul in Corinto, Nicaragua. He served in both positions until 1914. Upon his return in 1914, Johnson became involved with the NAACP, and by 1920, was serving as chief executive of the organization. Johnson published hundreds of stories and poems during his lifetime. He also produced works such as "God's Trombones", a collection that celebrates the African American experience in the rural South and elsewhere.
While in the diplomatic service, Johnson had begun to write his most famous literary work “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” in 1912 which he first published anonymously. This novel, published in 1912, became a work of note during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. It also made him the first Black American author to treat Harlem and Atlanta as subjects in fiction. Some of his other works include "The Book of American Negro Poetry, with an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius" in 1922. The anthology enabled new voices to resound on the literary scene and featured works by writers such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
Other works include “Black Manhattan, a Social History of Black New York,” and “His Negro Americans, What Now?”, a book advocating civil rights for African Americans. Johnson was also keen to promote other young writers and emerging artists and used his influence within literary spheres to further their cause. Johnson was also an influential public speaker and served many important positions such as treasurer of the Colored Republican Club, and editor of the “New York Age”.
In 1916, Johnson became field secretary for the NAACP, organizing mass demonstrations against Jim Crow Era laws, racism and violence. He also increased the NAACP’s membership rolls in southern states, an action that would set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement decades later. In 1917, he organized the famous “Silent March” down New York City's 5th Avenue to protest racial violence and lynching. The only sound was the drums that led the procession. Ten thousand Black Americans marched to bring attention to racial discrimination and violence, especially a massacre that had occurred a few weeks before in East St. Louis, Illinois. It was one of the first major mass demonstrations by African Americans.
He traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to investigate a brutal lynching that was witnessed by thousands. His report on the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the burning-to-death of Eli Persons was published nationally as a supplement to the July 1917 issue of the NAACP's Crisis magazine. As the first executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson helped increase membership and extended the movement's reach by organizing numerous new chapters in the South. During this period, the NAACP was mounting frequent legal challenges to the Southern states' disenfranchisement of African Americans.
The spring and summer of 1919 saw so much racialized violence and civil unrest across the United States. Social tensions erupted after veterans returned from the First World War, and tried to find work. In 1919, Johnson coined the term "Red Summer" and organized peaceful protests against the White racial violence against Blacks that broke out that year. The riots in Chicago and Washington, DC, stood out both for their high death tolls and because Black Americans rose up to fight back against the violence perpetrated against them.
Johnson resigned from the NAACP in 1930 and accepted a faculty position in creative writing and literature at Fisk University. In 1934, he became the first African American professor at New York University. He was the first Black professor to teach African American literature at a White university. Johnson remained active in the civil rights movement while teaching at Fisk, and in that year he published a book-length argument in favor of racial integration titled "Negro Americans, What Now?"
The civil rights struggle also figures in the title poem of Johnson’s last major verse collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1930). Throughout his career as a diplomat, journalist and civil rights activist, Johnson continued to use his creativity to explore various themes in African-American culture. Truly a Renaissance man, his artistic contributions to American literature, music and theatre have had an enormous impact on the history of Florida and beyond.