An Excerpt from the Current Issue : American poet David B. Austell's tribute to Harlem Renaissance Hero, James Weldon Johnson

 

DAVID B. AUSTELL

Marshaling the Milliards

Religious and Political Entanglement in the Poetry of James Weldon Johnson

 INTRODUCTION

If a traveler from an antique land¹ were to walk down West 4th Street in Greenwich Village just past Washington Square East and down a bit to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at New York University, skirting the security guard and down to the building’s lower level, there he would find a modest space with a small plaque identifying it as the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Classroom. This is a tribute to the first African American professor at NYU and the first such at any predominately white university in the United States. As a teacher, lawyer, diplomat, political leader, public intellectual, and author of poetry and prose, James Weldon Johnson was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Although he was born a southerner, he was a participant in the Great Migration, and much of his professional life took place in Manhattan during the early years of the 20th century at the mid-point of the negro nadir,²  an era of fierce oppression and degradation of African Americans in the United States. For such a time as this, Johnson would leave an indelible mark on the early civil rights movement as he helped marshal the milliards of African Americans into the early ranks of activists and protesters. He was well-suited for the task.  For ten years (1920 to 1930) Johnson was the first executive secretary of the NAACP.  Prior to this, he served as U.S. Consul General to both Venezuela and to Nicaragua during the Roosevelt and Taft presidential administrations (1906 to 1913). His literary life was both provocative and comforting, inciting and insightful, and his literary opus is always considered in terms of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance.  Moreover, Johnson compiled, anthologized, and published key volumes of African American arts and letters: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1921), and The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925). More recently perhaps, Johnson has been to a degree overshadowed by other luminaries of the Renaissance: W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker.  The unassuming classroom at NYU somehow exemplifies this.  Nonetheless, Johnson’s legacy is undeniable in African-American political life and the literary avant-garde of the Harlem Renaissance.³

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1871 to James Johnson, a successful head-waiter at St. James Hotel in Jacksonville during Florida’s early expansion as a tourist destination, and Helen Dillet Johnson of the Bahamas. Johnson’s younger brother, Rosamond Johnson, became a musician and composer (his most famous composition, often referred to as the “Negro National Anthem,” is the immortal Lift Every Voice and Sing with lyrics by James Weldon Johnson).  Both studied at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville where their mother was a teacher.  At an early age, James Weldon Johnson and his brother were introduced to the intense spiritual life of Jacksonville through the family’s membership in Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church with its liturgy steeped in the rich language of the King James Bible and its spiritual practices rooted in Africa (Johnson’s venerable Aunt Venie was a religious enthusiast and the “champion of the ring shouters…the music an African chant, and the shout an African dance, the whole pagan rite transplanted and adapted to Christian worship”⁴  W.E.B. Du Bois would refer to this as the frenzy⁵).  At age sixteen, James matriculated at Atlanta University from which he graduated in 1894. Rosamond would receive his undergraduate musical training at the New England Conservatory.  It was in Atlanta that Johnson had his first deepened sense of the “ramifications of race prejudice and an understanding of the American race problem”; at Atlanta University, he experienced the awakening awareness of the “peculiar responsibilities due to [his] own racial group” which his education at Atlanta University was preparing

him to meet.⁶ After graduating from AU, Johnson returned to the Stanton School in Jacksonville. He became its Principal in 1906.  During this period, Johnson also “read the law,” taking the Bar Exam in Florida in 1897 and subsequently becoming the first African-American to be admitted to the Florida State Bar.  James and Rosamond moved to New York City at the fin de siècle, and Johnson remained politically active even while he and Rosamond briefly formed a musical duo.  By 1906, Johnson had entered the United States Foreign Service traveling to Nicaragua as U.S. Consul General.  His life during this period was not unmitigated labor. The brilliant and refined New Yorker, Grace Nail, had captured Johnson’s attention during the time he and his brother were performing in the city, and in 1910 (the middle of his deployment abroad, during which his most famous work of prose was written, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man) James and Grace were married. Upon their return from diplomatic life and re-entry into the life of New York City, Johnson became involved with the newly formed NAACP (as a field organizer and later as the organization’s first Executive Secretary beginning in 1920).  Protesting the race riots in St. Louis in 1917, Johnson organized a “silent parade” of over ten thousand black New Yorkers of all ages; W.E.B. Du Bois led the drum corps of muffled and silent drums.⁷  From its inception, W.E.B. Du Bois had envisioned the NAACP as an “interracial organization, [and given his education and background] James Weldon Johnson was hired because he could mix with all kinds of people.”⁸ This skill was critical since both black and white members would be necessary to tackle the huge political challenges associated with the increasing lawlessness of southern states towards their African Americans residents, and the increasing frequency of race riots in northern states. Johnson’s leadership activities included opening new chapters of the NAACP, expanding its influence, and directly lobbying for key legislation, the most important of which at the time was the 1921 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill which had passed the House only to become derailed in the bitter race politics of the Senate.⁹  Johnson would lead the NAACP until his retirement from the organization in 1930. 

Intertwined with his myriad talents was Johnson’s dedication to the Muse. He was a poet, a key member of the Harlem literati, and to use David Howard-Pitney’s construct, a writer of verse jeremiads, deep public lamentations of the horrid racism against which Johnson organized his political life. His poetry, one of the great outpourings of the Harlem Renaissance, cut at the notion of American exceptionalism, for no country could continue as a “promised land” where unalienable rights were violently withheld from its most vulnerable inhabitants.¹⁰ The poems were also warnings for white Americans that race-hatred was morally degrading and spiritually corrupting. Johnson’s poetry, as all good poetry must, exists on several planes. In his early writings, he experimented with the use of dialect, which he later turned away from, only to return again to dialect as the authentic echoes of a past which was rapidly slipping away.¹¹ This is the context of God’s Trombones, Johnson’s masterwork of 1927.  Johnson’s poems were at times framed in poetic forms common to the day (i.e., quatrains, tightly organized rhyme-schemes, iambic pentameter). However, in his preface, Johnson states that African American poets must “find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without.¹² Johnson chose not to write God’s Trombones in dialect in order to capture the KJV-laced language used by the old-time preacher, to move away from stereotypes of black preachers of the South, and to demonstrate that black folk-life could be the substantive basis for a new poetics. What emerged was a hybrid, a new exposition of folk-preaching in which secular themes were encased in the full metal jacket of African American religiosity. 

POETRY AND TROPE

In God’s Trombones, as well as many other examples of his verse, James Weldon Johnson’s literary work exemplifies what Dr. Josef Sorett has identified as the “trope of black sacred/secular fluidity” where trope is identified as more than a repeating figure of speech (a riff in jazz terms). In Dr. Sorett’s framework, trope refers to a recurring tendency in studies of black religion in the United States demonstrating that African American religiosity and polity, the sacred and the secular, are intertwined, entangled in an interactive, fluid manner.13 Moreover, Sorett’s trope can be seen as adhering to Schlegel’s concept of historicism: that social and cultural behavior (here, intertwined/entangled, sacred/secular activities) are historically determined.¹⁴ 

 (To read the rest of the essay, please get a copy of the current Issue of Pratik Magazine)

David B. Austell, Ph.D., is Associate Provost and Director of the International Students and Scholars Office at Columbia University in New York City where he is also an Associate Professor of International Education in Teachers College-Columbia University.  In 1992, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Japan and Korea.   David’s third book of poetry, The Tin Man, regarding the life of Saint Joseph of Arimathea, has been published by Nirala.   

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