James Weldon Johnson

James William Johnson — he later took the middle name Weldon — was born on the seventeenth of June 1871 at Jacksonville, Florida, the eldest of three children of James Johnson — a Black headwaiter at the Saint James Hotel at Jacksonville — and Helen Louise Dillet Johnson, a primary-school teacher and the first Black female public-school teacher of Jacksonville.

He was placed at the Stanton School at Jacksonville — the principal Black secondary school of the city, founded by Helen Louise Dillet Johnson in 1869 — and at Atlanta University at Atlanta, completing the bachelor’s in 1894.

He wrote in collaboration with his brother John Rosamond Johnson — a composer and a Broadway lyricist — across the 1895 to 1905 period the principal Black-American song repertoire of the period — including the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing, written for the Stanton School Lincoln’s Birthday celebration of the twelfth of February 1900, and over a hundred and fifty Broadway musical-theatre songs published by the Klaw and Erlanger Broadway publishing house.

He read law at Jacksonville under the supervision of the white attorney Thomas A. Ledwith and was admitted to the Florida state bar in 1898 — among the first Black attorneys admitted to the Florida bar at the post-Reconstruction period.

He was nominated by President Theodore Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth of June 1906 as United States Consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela — having been recommended by the Roosevelt administration on the strength of his Republican-Party Florida political work. He was confirmed by the Senate on the twenty-eighth of June 1906 and served the Puerto Cabello Consulate from 1906 to 1909.

He was transferred in 1909 to the United States Consulate at Corinto, Nicaragua and served the Corinto Consulate from 1909 to 1913 — across the principal United States consular-and-political engagement with the Nicaraguan government of José Santos Zelaya at the time of the Zelaya-Madriz transition of 1909–1910 and the Adolfo Díaz administration of the 1910–1916 period.

He declined the offer of the United States Legation at the Azores in 1913 under the Wilson administration on the recognition of the Wilson administration’s racial-segregation programme.

He was named in 1916 the field secretary of the NAACP at New York and rose to the executive-secretary position in 1920 — the principal Black-American civil-rights organizational position of the period. He held the executive secretaryship for ten years until 1930.

He published in 1912 the principal Black-American novel of the early twentieth century — The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — published anonymously and revealed in 1927 to have been written by Johnson; in 1917 the poetry collection Fifty Years and Other Poems; in 1922 the foundational anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry; and in 1927 the poetry collection God’s Trombones — a series of seven negro-folk-sermons in verse, illustrated by Aaron Douglas (placed in this archive).

He died at Wiscasset, Maine on the twenty-sixth of June 1938 — in a train-and-automobile collision at a level crossing on the Maine Central Railroad route from Bowdoin College — at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the author of Lift Every Voice and Sing.