James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, to a father who was a head waiter and a mother who was a schoolteacher born in Nassau. A school principal, he founded a newspaper and became the first Black man admitted to the Florida bar by examination since Reconstruction, one of the examiners having left the room. With his brother and Bob Cole he wrote some two hundred songs for Broadway, including one that became the unofficial anthem of Black Americans. Consul in Venezuela and then in Nicaragua, he led from 1920 to 1930 the main civil rights organisation, then taught at Fisk. He died in 1938.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryGod's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in VerseJames Weldon Johnson · 1927LiteraturePublic domain