James Weldon Johnson
Author
Language
English
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Description
In this classic novel from the Harlem Renaissance, a biracial musician living in the Jim Crow era chooses to pass as white and deals with the consequences.
First published in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex—Colored Man is the story of an unnamed, light-skinned, biracial narrator born in a small Georgia town, during the years following the Civil War. He knows nothing about race, until he and his Black mother move to Connecticut and an episode at...
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Series
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English
Description
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) is an anthology by James Weldon Johnson. Alongside some of his own poems, Johnson includes the work of such legendary artists as Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Carefully selected and supported with a masterful preface by Johnson, the poems herein reflect a range of voices, styles, and subjects drawn from tradition and experience alike. In his preface, Johnson...
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English
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Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917) is a collection of poems by James Weldon Johnson. Although less popular than his book God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), Johnson's second poetry collection showcases, his talents as a rising star of African American literature. Including some poems that would be, featured in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), an influential anthology compiled and edited by the poet himself, Fifty Years and...
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English
Description
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse is a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson patterned after traditional African-American spiritual oratory. African-American scholars have identified the collection as one of Johnson's two most notable works, the other being Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
The work went on to find acclaim in many circles, proving "enormously popular among both the black cognoscenti as well of the masses of black Americans"...
Author
Language
English
Description
In his long career James Weldon Johnson established himself as a poet, composer, lawyer, diplomat, educator, and journalist. Yet he wrote only one novel: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Published anonymously in 1912, it received scant notice until its reissue in 1927 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. A landmark in African-American writing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was the first black novel written in the first person,...
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English
Description
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American civil rights activist and writer who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was the first African American chosen to be the executive secretary of the organization, a position he held between 1920 and 1930. A skilled writer, Johnson made a name for himself during the Harlem Renaissance for his writing and writing "Lift Every Voice and Sing"-also known as the Negro...
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English
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Originally published in 1930 and now back in print with an introduction by Zadie Smith, Black Manhattan traces the Black experience in New York City from its origins in the seventeenth century, through the Revolutionary and Civil War periods, to the triumphant achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Written by one of the leading Black scholars and activists of the first half of the twentieth century, this timeless book also illuminates Black literature,...
Author
Language
English
Description
African-American scholars have cited James Weldon Johnson's 1927 book of poems, "God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" as one of the author's most notable works. Johnson, who is best known for his 1912 work, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", was an American writer and civil rights activist born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1871. As a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Johnson helped to bring awareness...
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Language
English
Description
Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who can pass for white in turn-of-the-century America. Forced into impossible choices created by an unjust society, the narrator describes his experiences as he travels from Jacksonville to New York City, the rural...
Author
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English
Description
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery,...
