James Weldon Johnson was an amazing polymath, made even more remarkable by living as a Black man during the height of Jim Crow. He was a poet, an educator, a writer of essays and novels, a musician and lyricist, an activist and organizer, a newspaper publisher, a preacher, and a diplomat. He was, in short, a humanist, and his legacy helps us better understand the world we live in and our place in it.
Born in Jacksonville in 1871 to free-born parents, Johnson’s family pushed against the racial barriers of the late 19th century. His maternal grandfather was the first person of color to serve in the Bahamian colonial legislature. His mother taught school at the all Black Stanton Elementary School in Jacksonville, where Johnson attended. He then went on to attend Atlanta University, a Historically Black University, where he graduated with honors in 1894. Four years later, he became the first Black person to pass the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction.
While studying law, Johnson also returned to Stanton to teach and eventually became principal. As the school leader, he was instrumental in expanding Stanton into the only high school for African-Americans in Jacksonville. In 1900, to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, Stanton students performed “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by Johnson and put to music composed by his brother Rosamond. The song became known as the unofficial Black National Anthem and spoke of both the travails and patriotism of Black Americans.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Johnson and his brother moved to New York, where they worked on Broadway and wrote music across a variety of genres, including opera, Black spirituals, and popular show tunes. In doing so, the Johnson brothers broke racial barriers and showed that Black music could not be pigeonholed as simply minstrel songs. During this time, Johnson became involved in Republican party politics and, in appreciation of his support, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Venezuela. Johnson was later transferred to Nicaragua, where he served until 1914, when he came back to the U.S.
During this time, he wrote his most famous work, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a novel published anonymously in 1912. It was not until 1927 that Johnson acknowledged that the book was his. Focusing on race relations and racial identities, it has since been recognized as one of the seminal works in African-American literature. Upon his return from his diplomatic service, he worked for two years as an editorial writer and editor for a Black New York newspaper. His deeply impassioned writings impressed many in the Black community nationwide and two years later, he moved to Washington D.C., where he worked for 14 years with the NAACP, becoming its first Black executive official in 1920. With the NAACP, he became a tireless advocate for equality for Black Americans, supporting a federal anti-lynching bill, which was finally passed in 2022, 84 years after Johnson’s untimely death in 1938. Through his work with the organization and dramatically increasing its membership, Johnson became one of the most recognized Black figures in the country. In 1925, he received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, that organization’s highest award
His social and political activism did not interfere with his continuing literary career. By publishing poems, novels, edited volumes, and works of literary criticism and non-fiction, Johnson became an important figure in the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1922, he edited a volume entitled The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first such work to anthologize Black poets. He was instrumental in incorporating the oratory and sermons of Black preachers in his writings, especially in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, a book of his own poetry published in 1927. Much of the book is based upon Johnson’s experiences growing up in the Black church in Jacksonville. In 1933, he was awarded the W.E.B. DuBois Prize for Negro Literature.
James Weldon Johnson’s importance in 20th century American politics and letters cannot be overstated. His relationship to the Sunshine State, nurtured throughout his varied careers, provided the basis for his understanding of the world and its people. It is only fitting that Florida Humanities honors him as an inaugural member of its Hall of Fame.
