James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson was an American writer, poet, diplomat and civil rights activist, and one of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He lived from 1871 to 1938 and wrote at a time when Black Americans faced legal segregation across much of the country. His varied career, unusual for a writer of his generation, is one reason he remains a central figure in African American literature.

He was born in Jacksonville, Florida, into a family with roots in Virginia and the Bahamas. He studied at Atlanta University, where a classical education taught him to see his learning as a duty to his community. After serving as principal of a school in Jacksonville, he became in 1897 the first African American admitted to the Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction, although he never practiced law. He had also founded a newspaper, the Daily American, which lasted only about a year.

His work in music was equally important. With his brother J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole, he wrote songs for Broadway musicals, and he was largely responsible for the lyrics of around two hundred of them. In 1900 he wrote a poem to honor Booker T. Washington, which schoolchildren recited in Jacksonville; his brother set it to music in 1905. That song, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," became widely known as the Black National Anthem.

He later served as a consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua between 1906 and 1913, posts that left him time to write. During those years he worked on his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and on his poetry. He went on to lead the NAACP as its executive secretary from 1920 to 1930, and then taught at New York University and Fisk University.

His legacy lies in his literature, his civil rights work and the anthem he helped create. In 2020, New York University established a professorship in his name to recognize his scholarship.