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Books by James Weldon
Johnson
Lift Every
Voice and Sing /
The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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God’s Trombones
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Black Manhattan
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Along This Way
The Creation
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The Books of the American Negro Spirituals.
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God's Trombones: A Review
By
Amin Sharif I am old enough to remember when every black child was
required to memorize and recite the poems of Langston Hughes or
James Weldon Johnson. The recitation of these works usually took
place at church or in school. And these occasions came as close
to a rite of passage as anything possessed by the Black
Community in those days. Each child practiced for weeks to stand
before parents and friends to recite the words of these two
great poets. And woe unto the child who forgot his lines or who
gave a recitation that did not move those assembled. For the
younger children, Langston Hughes was more than appropriate. But
for those in the upper grades, James Weldon Johnson’s works
were the only ones that would suffice. And among Johnson’s
works, only
The Creation was
deemed a masterwork. Only the best of the best was ever allowed
to present this work to a congregation or the school assembly.
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The Creation
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And God stepped
out on space
And he looked
around and said:
I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world.
And as far as the
eye of God could see
Darkness covered
everything,
Blacker than a
hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp
Then God smiled,
And the light
broke,
And the darkness
rolled up on one side,
And the light
stood shining on the other,
And God said: that's good! |
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I can clearly remember an assembly at my old elementary
school # 138 when a senior from Douglas High School came to
present Johnson’s masterwork to my schoolmates and me. The
orator was a very dark skinned, youth with a deep bass voice.
Standing in a spotlight, the youth stretched out his arms and
became his dramatic presentation. There seemed to be no other
sound in the world but his voice as he described how God made
the world. Though the poem is relatively short, this youth
seemed to make time stand still for us. In our mind’s eye, we
saw God fling His heavenly Light against the Eternal Deep. And,
we saw how “like a mammy” the Creator knelt down to make Him
“a man.” To me, the recitation was like a song--an old Negro
spiritual--that I heard my great-grandmother sing while hanging
out wash. Yet, at the same time, the verses seemed more holy
than a spiritual. We all sat there mesmerized as the
presentation went on. And when the last words of the poem had
been spoken, we had the same strange feeling a child gets when
he emerges from baptismal waters.
It was with these memories that I sat down to watch a
presentation of James Weldon Johnson’s
God’s Trombone:
A Trilogy of African American Poems shown of WHUT
(Howard University’s channel).
Though this program was only a half-hour long, it was a
magnificent mixture of oration, animation, and music. The poems
(The Creation, The
Prodigal Son, and Go Down Death) were read by the well known
actors: James Earl Jones and Dorian Haywood. James Earl Jones
signature voice was perfect for Johnson’s Creation.
But Haywood’s masterful
presentation of Johnson’s The
Prodigal Son and Go Down Death was equally impressive.
Though I have never been a fan of claymation, this technique
along with stirring music made Haywood’s reading of The
Prodigal Son the high point of the program. Haywood’s voicing was
in the style of the great Black Southern Church Tradition. And,
one could visualize a congregation with white handkerchiefs and
fans shouting out their “amens” against a tide of singing
and clapping. All in all, the Trilogy
was well worth watching and a fitting tribute to the works of
Johnson.
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James
Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
Author, Lawyer, Diplomat |
James Weldon Johnson was born in
Jacksonville, Florida in 1871 and had a distinguished career as
an author, lawyer and diplomat. Johnson was educated at Atlanta
and Columbia Universities. He collaborated with his brother John
Rosamond Johnson to write some 200 songs. Among these was the
Negro Anthem
Lift Every
Voice and Sing. The brother also wrote a musical together.
From 1906 to 1910, Johnson was United
States consul to Venezuela. And in 1916 to 1920, Johnson was a
field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. He became the first black executive of the
NAACP in 1920. He held this position until 1930. In that same
year, Johnson became a professor of creative literature at Fisk
University. Soon after, Johnson published his novel
The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under a pseudonym.
Johnson’s most famous literary effort was
God’s Trombones
published in 1927.
God’s Trombones
are a collection of poetic sermons written in free
verse. It is said the Johnson considered the voice of the black
preacher to be a musical instrument “not a piano . . . or
trumpet but a trombone. Johnson was also the author of
Black Manhattan, a biography called Along This Way, and The
Books of the American Negro Spirituals. * * *
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James Weldon Johnson—A Chronology (1871-1938)
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Lift Every Voice
and Sing
By James Weldon
Johnson
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the listening skies,
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has
taught us,
Sing a song full of hope that the present has
brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died,
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been
watered
We have come treading our path through the blood of
the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light.
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where
we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world,
we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God
True to our native land.
Music by J. Rosamond
Johnson |
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Lift Every Voice
and Sing (Kim Weston) /
Lift Every Voice and Sing (Grace
Baptist Church Cathedral Choir)
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A group of young men in
Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln's birthday
in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to
write a song to be sung at the exercise. I wrote the words and
he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks,
made memeographed copies for us and the song was taught to and
sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
"Shortly afterwards, my brother and I moved from
Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds.
But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it, they
went off to other schools and sang it, they became teachers and
taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being
sung over the South and in some other parts of the country.
Today, the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn is
quite generally used.—James
Weldon Johnson
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The James Weldon
Johnson Memorial Collection
Founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten,
this collection stands as a memorial to
Dr. James Weldon Johnson and
celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and
artists, beginning with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Grace
Nail Johnson contributed her husband's papers, leading the way
for gifts of papers from Dr. W. E.
B. Du Bois, Walter White
and Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson,
Chester Himes, and
Langston Hughes. The
collection also contains the papers of
Richard Wright and Jean Toomer,
as well as Robert W. Small Funder groups of manuscripts or
correspondence of such writers as
Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen,
Zora Neale Hurston,
Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.
Representative manuscripts suggest
the richness of the collection: Richard Wright's Native Son
; Jean Toomer's Cane ; Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes
Were Watching God ; W. E. B. DuBois's “The Renaissance of
Ethics,” his Harvard thesis with annotations by William James;
James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man
and God's Trombones ; and Langston Hughes's The Weary
Blues. Examples of the abundant correspondence are letters
between Owen Dodson and Adam Clayton Powell, Joel Spingarn and
W. E. B. DuBois, Georgia Douglas Johnson and William Stanley
Braithewaite. The correspondence of Dr. Johnson and Walter White
documents the early history of the NAACP. Also present are music
manuscripts by W. C. Handy, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Thomas
“Fats” Waller, among others.
Carl Van Vechten photographed
hundreds of his friends including all the persons mentioned
above as well as Alvin Ailey, Marian Anderson, Pearl Bailey,
Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt,
Arthur Mitchell, Paul Robeson, Margaret Walker, and Ethel
Waters, to give but a sampling. These photographs, combined with
those collected by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, form an
important visual record of artists, writers, actors, musicians,
and politicians active in the United States from the 1920s
through the 1950s. Sculpture by Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage,
and Leslie Bolling, drawings by Mary Bell, a portrait head of
Ethel Waters by Antonio Salemme, as well as commemorative medals
and prints are among the many works of art in the collection.
Added in the 1990s, the Randolph Linsley Simpson Collection of
photographs of and by African Americans contains over
twenty-five hundred images from across the nation. Its formats
span the history of photography, from Daguerreotypes and cabinet
cards to photographic postcards and snapshots from 1850 to 1930.
James Weldon Johnson and his
brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, formed a successful team of
lyricist and composer best known for the anthem “Lift Every
Voice and Sing.” Less well remembered are the many popular hits
they sold as sheet music such as “Under the Bamboo Tree.” They
collected sheet music by other African American composers and
their collecting pattern continues.
Yale Library
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 10 December 2011
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