James Weldon Johnson

Although The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was in no way a genuine autobiography of the author’s life, he did pull numerous events in the book from his personal experiences in Jacksonville and New York, the music industry, and early civil rights activism. James Weldon Johnson was born to middle-class Bahamian parents in Jacksonville, Florida, where his father was the headwaiter at the St. James Hotel. He studied English literature and classical music at Atlanta University, graduating in 1894, before returning to Jacksonville and founding the nation’s first daily black newspaper, The Daily American, in 1895. He soon took an interest in law and became one of the first African-Americans to pass the Florida Bar Examination, but he never worked as a lawyer; instead, he became the principal of the all-black Stanton College Preparatory School, which is still widely considered one of the best high schools in the United States. With his conservatory-trained brother Rosamond, Johnson moved to New York in 1902. The brothers found immense success working with producer Bob Cole to sell their compositions to Broadway directors. He worked on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign, which led to a job as the first black United States consul in Venezuela (from 1906-1908) and then Nicaragua (from 1908-1913). He wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man during this time and married activist Grace Nail Johnson in 1910. After leaving his post in Nicaragua, they moved to Harlem, where they became leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance. Still sometimes called the “elder statesman” of the movement, Johnson famously mentored some of its most prominent figures, like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, and Anne Spencer. From 1920 to 1930, Johnson was the first black head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the role for which he is probably best remembered. He oversaw dramatic growth in the organization’s membership, from roughly 9,000 to 90,000 members by the end of his tenure, and particularly emphasized the fight against Southern lynching, lobbying aggressively to get the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed in Congress. In fact, in 1901, he was once nearly lynched himself in Jacksonville, which no doubt influenced his decision to leave for New York. He spent the last eight years of his life teaching creative writing and literature at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, and in 1938 he died in a car accident on vacation in Maine. His wife, who was driving at the time of this accident, suffered serious injuries but survived, and ultimately outlived her husband by nearly four decades.