Author of "Lift Every Voice and Sing"
The Negro National Anthem
born in Jacksonville,
Florida, where he attended the
Public Schools. In 1894 he grad
uated from Atlanta University,
with the degree of A. B., and he
received the degree of A. M. from
the same University in 1904. Mr.
Johnson also spent three years in post
graduate
work at Columbia University, in the City of
New
York. In 1917, the honorary degree of Litt.
D.,
was conferred upon him by the Talladega
College,
Talladega, Alabama.
For several years, Mr. Johnson was princi-
pal of the Colored high school at
Jacksonville. He
was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1897,
and prac
ticed law in Jacksonville until 1901, when
he re
moved to New York to collaborate with his
bro
ther, J. Rosamond Johnson, in writing for
the light
opera stage.
In 1906, he was appointed United States
Consul
at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, being
transferred as
Consul to Corinto, Nicaragua, in 1909, and
to the
Azores in 1912. While in Corinto, he looked
after
the interests of his country during the
stormy days
of revolution which resulted in the
downfall of
Zelaya, and through the abortive revolution
against
Diaz.
His knowledge of Spanish has been put to
use
in the translation of a number of Spanish
plays. He
was the translator for the English libretto
of "Goy-
escas," the Spanish grand opera
produced by the
Metropolitan Opera Company in 1915. Mr.
Johnson
also has several French translations to his
credit.
Mr. Johnson is well known throughout the
coun
try as the Contributing Editor of the New
York
Age. He added to his distinction as a
newspaper
writer by winning in an editorial contest,
one of
three prizes offered by the Philadelphia
Public
Ledger, in 1916.
During the fall of 1916 Mr. Johnson went on
a
six weeks mission throughout the South,
when he
interviewed the editors of the leading
white news
papers and talked with them regarding the
atti
tude they should take on the exodus of
Negro la
bor, which was then reaching its height,
and upon
the whole Negro question.
Mr. Johnson contributes to various
magazines
and periodicals. His poems have appeared in
the
Century, the Independent, the Crisis and
other pub
lications. He is the author of a novel,
"The Auto
biography of an Ex-Colored Man," and a
volume
of poems, "Fifty Years and Other
Poems." He is
a member of the American Society of Authors
and
Composers, the American Sociological
Society, and
of the Civic Club of New York, and is the
Field Se
cretary of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People.
It is as a writer that Mr. Johnson is best
known.
His novel, "The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored
Man" aroused considerable comment, and
his re
cent volume of poems, "Fifty Years and
Other
Poems" has been favorably reviewed by
a num
ber of the best critics of the country
Professor
Branden Matthews, of Columbia University,
in his
introduction which he wrote for the book,
says of
Mr. Johnson and his work, "But where
he shows
himself a pioneer is in the half-dozen
larger and
bolder poems, of a loftier strain, in which
he has
been -nobly successful in expressing amply
the
higher aspirations of his own people. It is
in ut
tering this cry for recognition, for
sympathy, for
understanding, and, above all, for justice,
that Mr.
Johnson is most original and most
powerful."
Mr. Elias Lieberman, in the American
Hebrew,
says of him, "James Weldon Johnson is
not only
versatile but more than that sincere. He
has con
tinued to do for the Negro race what Paul
Law
rence Dunbar began so inimitably. He has
thrown
the illuminating light of interpretation
upon lives
which for so many of us are puzzles."
The following was taken from a tribute to
him
in the Boston Evening Transcript :
"And in other verses that strike a
universal note
there is more often both felicity of
conception and
expression. Particular reference should be
made
to .Mr. Johnson's poem, "The Young
Warrior,"
which, set to music by Mr. Harry T.
Burleigh, has
been sung throughout Italy as a martial
song in
spiring the Italian soldier on his way to
the front.
The pieces in Negro dialect are
characteristic of
work of this kind and Mr .Johnson's
possesses the
usual intensity of pathos and the usual
humorous
abandon. One notes particularly, however,
in the
dialect verses in this volume, the absence
of
coarseness, of crudity, in the humor which
has
more or less pervaded the racial writers of
dialect
since Dunbar. Mr. Johnson, if he has done
noth
ing else to enhance the value of this kind
of speech
