June 17, 1871 – Birth of James Weldon Johnson, Civil Rights Activist & Co-Author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida. Graduating Stanton High School at the age of sixteen, Johnson enrolled in Atlanta University, from which be graduated in 1894. Afterwards, Johnson, though only twenty-three, returned to the Stanton School to become its principal. In 1895, he founded a newspaper, “The Daily American,” dedicated to reporting issues of interest to the Black community. In 1897, he became the first African American to pass the bar exam in Florida.

James Weldon Johnson

In 1900, James and his brother John wrote the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on the occasion of Lincoln’s birthday. The song became immensely popular in the Black community, and some twenty years later it was adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as the “Negro National Hymn.”

Johnson moved to New York and studied literature at Columbia University, where he met other African-American artists and became part of the “Harlem Renaissance.”

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, on the advice of Booker T. Washington, appointed James Weldon Johnson to diplomatic positions in Venezuela and Nicaragua. During the years he held this post, Johnson completed his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912.

James Weldon Johnson. 1943 Oil Painting by Laura Wheeler Waring.
National Portrait Gallery/ Smithsonian Institution

As his biography at poets.org explains:

[It was] the story of a musician who rejects his black roots for a life of material comfort in the white world. The book explores the issue of racial identity in the twentieth century, a common theme for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.”

Upon his return in 1914, Johnson became involved with the NAACP, and was the first African-American to be selected as Executive Secretary, a position in which he served from 1920 to 1930.

A biography by Eugene Levy (author of James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice, 1973) points out:

Johnson . . . labored with considerable success to put the NAACP on secure financial ground. He spent much time in Washington unsuccessfully lobbying to have Congress pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime. Finally, Johnson was a key figure in making the NAACP a clearinghouse for civil-rights court cases. . . . In all these efforts he worked closely with Walter White, whom he brought into the NAACP as his assistant and who succeeded him as secretary, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of Crisis, the NAACP monthly journal.”

Biographer Herman Beavers recounted how even while at the NAACP, Johnson continued to play an active role in the Harlem Renaissance:

As a prominent voice in the literary debates of the day, Johnson undertook the task of editing The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926), and writing his survey of African American cultural contributions to the New York artistic scene in Black Manhattan (1930). His own career as a poet reached its culmination in God’s Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927.”

In the late 1930s, Johnson became Professor of Creative Literature and Writing at Fisk University, lecturing around the country and continuing to write. He died in an automobile accident while vacationing in Maine in June of 1938.

You can read the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” here, and you can hear a fabulous jazzy rendition of it performed by Ray Charles in the 1972 video below.