James Weldon Johnson

The protest came in the aftermath of the July 2nd East St. Louis race riot and a number of lynchings in Texas.

Organized by Black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and the NAACP, the Silent Parade protested lynchings and anti-Black violence.

Children led the march dressed in white.

Women, who were also dressed in white, followed them.

But Wilson took no action.

In fact, he opposed anti-lynching legislation and continued segregationist policies in federal offices.

In an editorial for The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson pointed out, quote, "That their brothers and sisters, people just like them-

them-were Jim Crowed and segregated and disenfranchised and oppressed and lynched and burned alive in this, the greatest republic in the world, the great leader in the fight for democracy and humanity.

The Harlem Renaissance is a term for the efflorescence of Black culture that really exploded in the post-World War I period, especially in New York.

York.You had writers like Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston emerging as prominent voices.

The Renaissance is a term for that emergence, for that, uh, efflorescence that is a real shift from a period in the beginning of the 20th century which saw the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, which saw, um, an increase in incidents of racial violence and lynching, and a real...

Rayford Logan, the historian, calls it the nadir of race relations in the US, the Jim Crow era, when, uh, Blacks were violently, um, crushed out of the paths of social mobility in American society.

And I think I read somewhere that we didn't create the water.

I remember when James Weldon Johnson took that creation story and wrapped it into the lingo of the black church, he

said that God stepped out and spat out

the seeds.

Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem entitled Signs of the Times, a Thanksgiving poem, was read by one of the pupils, and also The Party, another of Dunbar's pieces, was rendered.

The Negro National Hymn, words by James W. Johnson and music by his brother Rosemond Johnson, was sung by a chorus of fifty voices.

At the opening of the service, the president's Thanksgiving proclamation was read and appropriate remarks were made by Mrs. Wilkins.

You know what? It sucks to be bored.

There is no African American writer, and some white writers, from the 1870s and 80s right on through well into the twentieth century, who could ever avert their eyes from this story.

This is a passage from James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

If you've ever read that wonderful 1912 novel you'll know it's the story of a black man who's passing for white.

But because he's passing in the South, he gets to see things that people don't know he's seeing.

Well, I'll give you time for questions, but I thought I would recite for you a poem, a famous poem about creation.

Now, this poem was written by a man named James Weldon Johnson.

James Holden Johnson was an African-American who lived in the beginning part of the 20th century.

I don't know, maybe he was afraid that African-American preaching was going to disappear.

I was so struck by this.

I was so impressed with it, I've never forgotten it.

So that's what James Weldon Johnson's poems are like.

There are seven poems in there.

But Stanton High School was, you know, the segregated black high school.

And this, of course, is where James Weldon Johnson was principal for a time period.

Following its closure in 1927, the Duval High School building was repurposed several times.

It was briefly a junior high school in the 1940s and was then used as administrative offices for Duval County Public Schools until 1971.