James Weldon Johnson




James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) enjoyed a long and multifaceted career as essayist, critic, songwriter, poet, diplomat, attorney, educator and politician. In each of these capacities, Johnson dedicated his energies and passions toward the advancement of African Americans. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents of humble, yet noble vocations: his father worked as a headwaiter at the opulent St. James hotel; and his mother was the first female and black teacher at an elementary school in Florida. It was his mother who taught her son her love for music of the European tradition and English Literature (1). At the age of sixteen, Johnson became a student at Atlanta University. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1894, and later received an honorary MA from that institution. Johnson began a career in education with a teaching post at a rural, backwater Georgia school in which he taught the children of freed slaves. Later he continued at Stanton Preparatory College, eventually become its principal at the age of twenty-three. As principal, he broadened the curriculum with courses in English, Algebra, Spanish, and bookkeeping. Johnson left this post to pursue a law career, and passed the Florida Bar, becoming the first African American since Reconstruction to do so.

Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of James Weldon Johnson's illustrious career as a member of the African American--and American intelligentsia, was the emphasis he placed on the folk.While still a young man, Johnson went to rural Georgia, where he made his first acquaintance with the children of former slaves. Gates, et al. quotes Johnson as he reflected on the experience, saying that "[i]n all my experience there has been no period so brief that has meant so much in my education for life as the three months I spent in the backwoods of Georgia...I was thrown  for the first time on my own resources and abilities. I had my first lesson in dealing with men and conditions in the outside world...It was this period that marked the beginning of my psychological change from boyhood to manhood. It was this period which marked also the beginning of my knowledge of my people as a 'race'" (qtd. in Gates 791). Such a stance would put Johnson at odds with at least one of the most outspoken cultural leaders philosophers of Africana during this period: W.E.B. Dubois.

By the turn of the last century, Johnson launched a career in activism first through publishing, and founded the newspaper The Daily American. Though the publication went bankrupt only a few years later, Johnson was undaunted. Johnson became the first African American organizer--and later, secretary--of the NAACP, and served as editor and anthologist during the Harlem Renaissance. In this latter capacity he was instrumental in undermining white publishing entities and bringing numerous African American artists and poets to national attention.

Johnson's own literary contributions during this time were generative, and today have been anthologized and studied widely. His collection, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, was published in 1922, honors the tradition set forth by the African American 'folk' preacher, and celebrates the unique poetry and art expressed through the sermon.

Respected actor and bass-baritone singer, the late William Warfield recites James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation":







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Vernacular Tradition

Image
Hoodoo Priestess Marie Laveau ( photo credit ). "In African American literature, the vernacular refers to the church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and, in our own era, hip-hop songs that are part of the oral, not primarily the literate (or written-down) tradition of black expression. What distinguishes this body of work is its in group and, at times, secretive, defensive, and aggressive character: it is not, generally speaking, produced for circulation beyond the black group itself (though it sometimes is bought and sold by those outside its circle)" As Gates' definition suggests, the Vernacular encompasses the cultural creations of African Americans not simply as a form of catharsis or self-expression, but as a means of resistance. African American folk expression has been defined by scholars as "double-voiced," indicating that folk songs, sermons, jokes, and other modes of expression retained a meaning for the culture--and a separate mean...
Read more

The Cult of Domesticity

Image
The Cult of Domesticity--or, more pejoratively-- The Cult of True Womanhood , to the codification of social, sexual, and moral behavior for women in the 19th Century from 1820 until 1860.  It was Catherine Beecher, sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who identified the four pillars of virtue that would hold women to behavioral convention and keep them under masculine control.  By referring to this set of beliefs as pertaining to a "cult" reveals the depth of its impact on women's lives. Below are the four pillars of modest behavior, expected of all women of the middle class.  Piety : As Victorian society was divided into separate spheres--that of men (exterior world of business and work); and that of women (the home), 19th century women were thought to represent the 'heart' of the Victorian home, and therefore were believed responsible for embodying Christian asceticism, faith, modesty, and were entrusted with the religious instruction of children. Purity :...
Read more

W.E.B. Dubois: Criteria of Negro Art

Image
Dr. Dubois by Carl Van Vechten One of the most prominent of all African  American leaders of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), a self-proclaimed "race man" was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. DuBois was educated primarily in the North at Harvard and in Germany where he prepared for his Ph.D. However, it was when attended school at Fisk that he was confronted the appalling racism prevalent in the South: an experience that helped to shape his political philosophy and life's work. By the time he became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio, DuBois was a published author. DuBois had made it his mission to seek out "forums beyond academe from which he could address fundamental problems of race and justice in the United States" and one of those forums was the written page.  He was published in such prestigious literary journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial , and his essays focused on sociological aspects of the ...
Read more