FREE ESSAY ON LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

The author of Lift Every Voice and Sing (often called the Negro National Anthem), James
Weldon Johnson had a long career as a creative writer, black leader, teacher, lawyer,
diplomat, and executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. Through his writing he protested racial injustice, encouraged black
achievement, and added immeasurably to the wealth of American literary art. 
A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson attended Atlanta University through graduate
school. In 1901 he became the first African American admitted to the Florida Bar, but he
did not re-main in Florida very long. Forming a creative partnership with his younger
brother Rosamond, a writer of popular music, he began to write lyrics. They moved to New
York and found fame as the ragtime songwriting team of Cole and Johnson Brothers. 
and founded a short-lived newspaper called The Daily American. For ten years, he wrote
editorials for the New York Age, a prominent African-American newspaper. He was one of
the founders and a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and
Publishers, and he became field secretary for the NAACP in 1916. The song was originally
written for schoolchildren at an Abraham Lincoln birthday celebration in 1900. The
Creation 
James Weldon Johnson James E. Ransome (Illustrator) Format: Hardcover, 1st ed., 32pp.
ISBN: 0823410692
Publisher: Holiday House, Inc.
Pub. Date: March 1995
Edition Desc: 1st ed
Songwriter, poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and autobiographer. James Weldon Johnson,
much like his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, was a man who bridged several historical and
literary trends. Born in 1871, during the optimism of the Reconstruction period, in
Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was imbued with an eclectic set of talents. Over the
course of his sixty-seven years, Johnson was the first African American admitted to the
Florida bar since the end of Reconstruction; the co-composer (with his brother John
Rosamond) of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' the song that would later become known as the
Negro National Anthem; field secretary in the NAACP; journalist; publisher; diplomat;
educator; translator; librettist; anthologist; and English professor; in addition to
being a well-known poet and novelist and one of the prime movers of the Harlem
Renaissance.
As the first son of James Johnson and the former Helen Louise Dillet, James Weldon
inherited his forebears' combination of industrious energy and public-mindedness, as
demonstrated by his maternal grandfathers long life in public service in the Bahamas,
where he served in the House of Assembly for thirty years. James, Sr., spent many years
as the headwaiter of the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had moved the
family after his sponge fishing and dray businesses were ruined by a hurricane that hit
the Bahamas in 1866. James, Jr., was born and educated in Jacksonville, first by his
mother, who taught for many years in the public schools, and later by James C. Walter,
the well-educated but stern principal of the Stanton School. Graduating at the age of
sixteen, Johnson enrolled in Atlanta University, from which be graduated in 1894. After
graduation, Johnson, though only twenty-three, returned to the Stanton School to become
its principal.
In 1895, Johnson founded the Daily American, a newspaper devoted to reporting on issues
pertinent to the black community. Though the paper only lasted a year (with Johnson doing
most of the work himself for eight of those months) before it succumbed to financial
hardship, it addressed racial injustice and, in keeping with Johnson's upbringing,
asserted a self-help philosophy that echoed Booker T. Washington. Of the demise of the
paper he wrote in his autobiography, Along This Way, The failure of the Daily American
was my first taste of defeat in public life. . . . However the effort was not a total
failure, for both Washington and his main rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, became aware of
Johnson through his journalistic efforts, leading to opportunities in later years.
Turning to the study of law, Johnson studied with a young, white lawyer named Thomas A.
Ledwith. But despite the fact that he built up a successful law practice in Jacksonville,
Johnson soon tired of the law (his practice had been conducted concurrently with his
duties as principal of the Stanton School). When his brother returned to Jacksonville
after graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1897, James's poems
provided the lyrics for Rosamond's early songs. By the end of the decade, both brothers
were in New York, providing compositions to Broadway musicals. There they met Bob Cole,
whom Johnson described as a man of such immense talent that he could write a play, stage
it, and play a part.
The brothers split their time between Jacksonville and New York for a number of years
before settling in New York for good. However, their greatest composition, the one for
which they are best known, was written for a Stanton School celebration of Lincoln's
birthday. Lift Every Voice and Sing was a song that, as Johnson put it, the brothers let
pass out of [their] minds, after it had been published.
But the song's importance grew from the students, who remembered it and taught it to
other students throughout the South, until some twenty years later it was adopted by the
NAACP as the Negro National Hymn.
It was this kind of creativity under duress, coupled with his connections in the
political sphere, that characterized Johnson's life as an artist and activist. Indeed,
between the years 1914 and 1931, his desire to explore the limits of both worlds led him
to seek a more thorough synthesis of his public and artistic sensibilities. The study of
literature, which Johnson began around 1904 under the tutelage of the critic and novelist
Brander Matthews, who was then teaching at Columbia University, caused Johnson to
withdraw from the Cole/Johnson partnership to pursue a life as a writer. However, this
creative impulse coincided with his decision in 1906 to serve as United States consul to
Venezuela, a post that Washington's political connections with the Roosevelt
administration helped to secure.
During the three years he held this post, Johnson completed his only novel, The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912. Though many
read the novel as a sociological document, its true value lies in the manner in which it
recasts the tragic mulatto story within the context of Du Bois's metaphor of the veil.
The novel sparked renewed interest when Johnson announced in 1927 that he had authored
the book as fiction. Indeed, so great was the public propensity to equate the novel's
hero with Johnson himself that Johnson felt obliged to write his autobiography, which
appeared in 1933 under the title Along This Way.
He had, by this time, established himself as an important figure in the Harlem
Renaissance. From his post as field secretary of the NAACP, Johnson was a witness to the
changes taking place in the artistic sphere. As a prominent voice in the literary debates
of the day, Johnson undertook the task of editing The Book of American Negro Poetry
(1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), The Second Book of American Negro
Spirituals (1926), and writing his survey of African American cultural contributions to
the New York artistic scene in Black Manhattan (1930). His own career as a poet reached
its culmination in God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927.
Though not noted for playing the role of polemicist, through each of these literary
enterprises Johnson worked to refute biased commentary from white critics while prodding
African American writers toward a more ambitious vision of literary endeavor. It was
Johnson's great hope that the contributions of younger writers would do for African
Americans, what [John Millington] Synge did for the Irish, namely utilizing folk
materials to express the racial spirit [of African Americans] from within, rather than
[through] symbols from without. . . . Hence Johnson's attempt to discredit Negro dialect,
a literary convention characterized by misspellings and malapropisms, which in Johnson's
view was capable of conveying only pathos or humor. Though writers like Zora Neale
Hurston and Sterling A. Brown would challenge this viewpoint, Johnson's point must be
understood within the context of his life as a public figure.
With the arrival of the 1930s, Johnson had seen the NAACP's membership rolls and
political influence increase, though the latter failed to produce tangible legislative
and social reform in Washington. Retiring to a life as Professor of Creative Literature
and Writing at Fisk University, Johnson lectured widely on the topics of racial
advancement and civil rights, while completing Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book
that argued for the merits of racial integration and cooperation, and his last major
verse collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1934). Though he died
in a tragic automobile accident while vacationing in Maine in June of 1938, Johnson
continues to be remembered for his unflappable integrity and his devotion to human
service. From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright ? Oxford
University Press.
. It was during his college years that he first became aware of the depth of the racial
problem in the United States, and Johnson's experience teaching black schoolchildren in a
poor district of rural Georgia during two summers left a deep impression on him. The
struggles and aspirations of American blacks form a central theme in the thirty or so
poems that Johnson wrote as a student.