Lift Ev’ry Voice: James Weldon Johnson’s Quest to Amplify Black Freedom
The Harlem Renaissance poet who wrote the “Black National Anthem” was a renaissance man indeed. James Weldon Johnson was a professor, anti-lynching activist, foreign diplomat, and a leader of the NAACP.
James Weldon Johnson was a black American civil rights leader and a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He is best remembered as the creator of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” otherwise known as the “Black National Anthem.”
Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, a city known for its proud legacy of black American residents like T. Thomas Fortune, Zora Neale Hurston, and A. Philip Randolph.
His mother, Helen Louise Dillet, was of Bahamian descent and imparted to him a love for reading, the English language, and European musical traditions. Helen was both a talented musician and a teacher in the segregated Edward M. Stanton elementary school, where Johnson attended through eighth grade. His father, James Johnson, was a preacher at Shiloh Baptist Church in Jacksonville. He also worked as the head waiter at Jacksonville’s luxurious St. James Hotel, one of the first winter resorts in Florida.
His parents had risen as high as the racial glass ceiling of southern society allowed, but Johnson aspired to more. He enrolled at Atlanta University (today, Clark Atlanta University), a school founded in 1865 to give black Americans access to a college education. He graduated in 1894 and returned to Jacksonville to become principal of the same Stanton school where his mom taught, converting it into a K-12 school.
While at Stanton, he studied law, later becoming the first black lawyer in Florida. And in 1895 he founded The Daily American, the first black newspaper in Jacksonville. While the paper only lasted a year, it was one of Johnson’s first efforts at addressing America’s simmering racial issues, a particularly bold move in a segregated state like Florida.
After the paper shut down, Johnson served in a number of foreign service roles; President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him as U.S. consul in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the Azores. This work later influenced his thinking around race diplomacy during the “New Negro” movement and the Harlem Renaissance.
During his time in the Azores, he penned a prominent novel on racial identity, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. This seminal book tells the story of a musician who turns his back on his black roots to experience material comfort and a life of ease in the white world. Attempting to avoid any conflict of interest with his diplomatic career, Johnson chose to not acknowledge this novel, referring to it as a fictional piece despite its clearly autobiographical nature.
In 1904, Johnson met Grace Nail, daughter of John E. Nail, an influential black real estate speculator while on a trip to New York City. The two wed in 1910. In ensuing years, he returned to New York with his brother Rosamond and became increasingly involved with the Harlem Renaissance. The duo collaborated on several songwriting projects, some of which made it to Broadway.
Johnson became a prominent voice in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance through his innovative poetry, spiritual anthologies, and unwavering efforts to boost awareness of the arts. His signature achievement, the poem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (1899), was set to music by his brother Rosamond.
In 1917, Johnson became a leader with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s prominent civil rights organization. As one of his first activities with the organization, Johnson traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to investigate a heinous lynching witnessed by thousands. His report in the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine on the brutal burning of Ell Person galvanized black efforts against the still routine practice.
Two years into his appointment in 1919, the nation experienced a torrent of white supremacist terrorism and race riots in more than three dozen U.S. cities. This bloody period of violence and civil unrest became popularly known as the “Red Summer,” a term that Johnson coined.
In 1920, Johnson became the NAACP’s executive secretary, serving in that position until 1930. During his tenure, Johnson helped boost outreach and advocacy, leading to an explosion in membership from 8,765 in 1916 to 90,000 in 1920. The number of local chapters grew from 70 to 395. 1
Under his leadership, the NAACP pursued legal challenges to the disenfranchisement of black Americans in Southern states, which was often tied to poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries. In 1921 the NAACP supported a major piece of civil rights activism, the federal Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which would have made lynching a national crime. It failed to pass, however, due to vehement opposition of southern congressional Democrats.
After his retirement as NAACP head in 1930, Johnson became a visiting professor in creative writing at New York University, before moving on to a full professorship at Fisk University, a historical black college.
Johnson passed away in 1938 while on vacation in Wiscasset, Maine, when the car his wife was driving was broadsided by a train. Over 2,000 people attended his funeral in Harlem.
Historian Patricia Sullivan says of Johnson in her book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement:
His remarkable achievements did not shield Johnson from his status as a black man in America. In 1902 he was nearly lynched in Jacksonville for socializing publically with a woman who looked white. And as part of a musical trio that included his brother Rosamond, Johnson toured to the far couriers of the nation and learned firsthand that racial discrimination knew no boundaries.2
In a chapter she contributed to the book “Harlem Speaks”: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, literature scholar Anne E. Carroll offered this concluding thought:
No single person was more important to the Harlem Renaissance than James Weldon Johnson. His literary and musical accomplishments earned him the respect of African American writers and artists, while his leadership position in the NAACP brought him contacts and influence among liberal whites.3
It is appropriate to end with Weldon’s own paean to freedom:
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty