James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson

The author of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (often called "the Negro National Anthem"), James Weldon Johnson had a long career as a creative writer, black leader, teacher, lawyer, diplomat, and executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Through his writing he protested racial injustice, encouraged black achievement, and added immeasurably to the wealth of American literary art.

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson attended Atlanta University through graduate school. In 1901 he became the first African American admitted to the Florida Bar, but he did not re-main in Florida very long. Forming a creative partnership with his younger brother Rosamond, a writer of popular music, he began to write lyrics. They moved to New York and found fame as the ragtime songwriting team of Cole and Johnson Brothers.

and founded a short-lived newspaper called The Daily American. For ten years, he wrote editorials for the New York Age, a prominent African-American newspaper. He was one of the founders and a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and he became field secretary for the NAACP in 1916. The song was originally written for schoolchildren at an Abraham Lincoln birthday celebration in 1900. The Creation

James Weldon Johnson James E. Ransome (Illustrator) Format: Hardcover, 1st ed., 32pp.

ISBN: 0823410692

Publisher: Holiday House, Inc.

Pub. Date: March 1995

Edition Desc: 1st ed

Songwriter, poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and autobiographer. James Weldon Johnson, much like his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, was a man who bridged several historical and literary trends. Born in 1871, during the optimism of the Reconstruction period, in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was imbued with an eclectic set of talents. Over the course of his sixty-seven years, Johnson was the first African American admitted to the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction; the co-composer (with his brother John Rosamond) of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' the song that would later become known as the Negro National Anthem; field secretary in the NAACP; journalist; publisher; diplomat; educator; translator; librettist; anthologist; and English professor; in addition to being a well-known poet and novelist and one of the prime movers of the Harlem Renaissance.

As the first son of James Johnson and the former Helen Louise Dillet, James Weldon inherited his forebears' combination of industrious energy and public-mindedness, as demonstrated by his maternal grandfathers long life in public service in the Bahamas, where he served in the House of Assembly for thirty years.