The Book of American Negro Poetry
By James Weldon Johnson
There is, perhaps, a better excuse for giving an Anthology of American Negro Poetry to the public than can be offered for many of the anthologies that have recently been issued. The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets–to supply this lack of information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody’s effort. Moreover, the matter of Negro poets and the production of literature by the coloured people in this country involves more than supplying information that is lacking.
It is a matter which has a direct bearing on the most vital of American problems. A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produce great literature and art. The world has ever looked upon no person who has made great literature and art as distinctly inferior. The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions.
And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art. Is there a likelihood that the American Negro will be able to do this? There is, for the excellent reason that he possesses the innate powers. He has emotional endowment, originality, artistic conception, and, more importantly, the power to create something with universal appeal and influence.
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James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American writer and civil rights activist.
Biography
He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies, which collected both poems and spirituals of black culture.
He wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which later became known as the Negro National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson. Johnson was appointed under President Theodore Roosevelt as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua for most of the period from 1906 to 1913. 1934, he was the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically black university.
James Weldon Johnson
