James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnsonwas an American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Johnson is best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he started working in 1917. In 1920 he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth17 June 1871
CountryUnited States of America
A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.
Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.
My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage
Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.
And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely - I'll make me a world.
I'm lonely I'll make me a world.
Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.
Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
O Black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.
My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.