James Weldon Johnson

About the Author

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was an American writer, lawyer and civil rights activist born in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the first Executive Secretary of the NAACP and was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known works include The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, republished in 1927), the poetry collection God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and the anthology he compiled and edited, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).