James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida on June 17, 1871. Despite his mother being a school teacher, he would still need to move to Atlanta to attend high school because there were no high schools for African Americans in Florida. After college, he returned to Jacksonville and, in 1897, became the first African American lawyer to become a member of the Florida Bar. That was not to be the end of the history making in his life, however.

Harlem Renaissance

Johnson was a renaissance man; a teacher, poet, author, Broadway musical composer, ambassador to Venezuela and Nicaragua, and a civil rights activist. He was also a leader in Harlem’s “Black Renaissance” that inspired a generation of art and entrepreneurship. He may be best remembered for a song he composed with his brother in 1900, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” more commonly known as “The Black National Anthem.” However, his most impactful legacy may be his tenure as the first African-American executive secretary of the NAACP.

Composer and Teacher

The Black National Anthem was originally composed for a chorus of five hundred children to perform in honor of Booker T. Washington during his “Lincoln’s Birthday” visit to the Stanton School. The Stanton was a Jim Crow-era school for African Americans only in Jacksonville, where Johnson was principal. During Johnson’s tenure, he expanded the length of the school year for his students and added the 8th and 9th grades. The 10-12 grades would not come for several decades.

Civil Rights Activist

He would become active in the civil rights movement in the wake of WW1, as soldiers of all ethnicities returned home to find themselves competing for limited work and housing. This led to inflated ethnic tensions, aggravated by anti-unionists. His non-violent activism during the “Red Summer” would eventually propel him to a leadership role in the NAACP. 

Author and Professor

After all that work, at age 59, he returned to university to attain another degree in creative writing so that he could write and teach for many more years.

James Weldon Johnson Literacy Festival

It is impossible to properly biograph such an illustrious and prolific man in a short blog page like this. Fuller biographies are available here. And of course, you can join us at the James Weldon Johnson Literacy Festival in St. Pete on March 15. It will be a family-friendly event with books and games; everyone is welcome. 

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The Storytelling of James Weldon Johnson:

Poetry

• Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917)
• God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)
• Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1935)

Anthologies

• The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, editor), anthology 
• The Book of Negro Spirituals (1925, editor), anthology
• The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926, editor)

Other works

• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912/1927, novel)
• Black Manhattan (1930, study)
• Negro Americans, What Now? (1934, essay)
• Johnson, James Weldon (1968) [1933]. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (Viking Compass ed.). New York: Viking Press.