James Weldon Johnson

James William Johnson — who in 1913 took the more distinguished middle name Weldon — was born on the seventeenth of June 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, the elder of two children of James Johnson, a headwaiter at the St. James Hotel, and Helen Louise Dillet, a schoolteacher and musician of Bahamian birth. His only sibling was his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, who became a noted composer. First taught by his mother, Johnson graduated from Atlanta University in 1894 and returned home to lead the Stanton School.

In 1898 he became the first Black man admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. With his brother Rosamond he wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 — later cherished as the Black National Anthem — before the pair found success writing songs for the New York stage. His gifts and fluency in Spanish carried him into the diplomatic service: he served as United States Consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, from 1906 to 1908, and at Corinto, Nicaragua, from 1909 to 1913.

Leaving the consular service, Johnson joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, rising to executive secretary in 1920 and holding that office through 1930. He built the organization into a national force, campaigning against lynching and disenfranchisement while giving voice to a people's dignity.

He remained a towering man of letters — author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the sermon-poems of God's Trombones (1927), and the landmark Book of American Negro Poetry. He died on the twenty-sixth of June 1938 at Wiscasset, Maine. May his voice, lifted for a whole people, never fall silent.