James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
James Weldon Johnson was a leading African American author, poet, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, he was the first African American accepted to the Florida bar. He served in several public capacities, including as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, but he is best remembered today for his writing, which included novels, poems, and collections of folklore.
His first major literary sensation was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a fictional account of a light-skinned black man’s attempts to succeed and survive in the early 20th century. It was while serving as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 through 1931 that he released God’s Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, one of the works he is best remembered for today
Vade Mecum 