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
Make yourself as happy as possible, and try to make those happy whose lives come in touch with yours. But to attempt to right the wrongs and cease the sufferings of the world in general is a waste of effort.
When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over.
My luck at the gambling table was varied; sometimes I was fifty to a hundred dollars ahead, and at other times I had to borrow money from my fellow workmen to settle my room rent and pay for my meals.
She was my first love, and I loved her as only a boy loves.
O Black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.
I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.
Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
This country can have no more democracy than it accords and guarantees to the humblest and weakest citizen.
I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.
Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town.
And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.
I'm lonely I'll make me a world.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.