Few leaders have combined such keen intelligence with such varied talents as did Johnson, whom biographer Robert Fleming called "truly the 'Renaissance man' of the Harlem Renaissance."

A leading literary and political figure, Johnson was instrumental not only in the growth of the NAACP but also in the formation and nurturing of a distinctly African American artistic community. Poetry, song lyrics, fiction, history, and editorials flowed from his pen and made Johnson one of the great men of African American letters.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson grew up in a cultured household. His mother, a schoolteacher, had been born free in Nassau, Bahamas, and had spent much of her childhood in New York City. Johnson's father worked as headwaiter at a Jacksonville resort restaurant but still found time to read works by Greek biographer Plutarch. He was a self-educated man who spoke and read Spanish and enjoyed philosophical discussions.

Both James and his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, were given music lessons at an early age, and their mother read to them at night from Charles Dickens and other Victorian novelists. Early trips to the Bahamas and New York supplemented Johnson's cosmopolitan upbringing.

After completing his education in Jacksonville, where the black schools went only to the eighth grade, Johnson enrolled in Atlanta University both for preparatory and university classes. He spent seven years there, learning Latin and Greek, studying public speaking, singing with the Glee Club, and writing poetry. Upon his graduation in 1894, Johnson took a job as principal of his old grammar school, a position he held for nearly eight years.

As principal he added ninth and tenth grades and visited white schools in search of ideas for improving his students' education. While working full-time as a principal, in 1895 Johnson launched a newspaper, the Daily American, which, although it was published for only eight months, gave him an opportunity to use his literary talents in the service of racial justice. At the same time, he learned the law by apprenticeship with a local attorney and passed the bar exam in 1898.

Johnson's brother Rosamond, who had received formal musical training in Boston, persuaded Johnson to collaborate with him in writing songs. In 1900 the two wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song that became known as the Negro national anthem. Two years later Johnson and his brother Rosamond made their final move to New York, where the brothers, along with Bob Cole, became a successful songwriting team.

While there, Johnson studied literature at Columbia University and met other African American artists such as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and composer Will Marion Cook. In 1904 friends from Atlanta University invited Johnson to join the Colored Republican Club in New York, where his work for candidate Theodore Roosevelt earned him a consulate post. He left for Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in 1906.

Johnson's career as a diplomat lasted eight years, during which he served in Venezuela and Nicaragua. With his excellent Spanish and elegant social manner, he became a popular figure in the racially diverse Latin American cities to which he was sent. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue literary work, beginning a novel that would eventually be titled "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (published anonymously in 1912).

In 1910 Johnson married Grace Nail, gaining companionship for the less enjoyable Nicaragua posting he had begun in 1909. When the Democrats regained the White House in 1913, Johnson resigned his consular duties, returned to New York, and turned his attention to literature.

He became a contributing editor at the New York Age, an African American weekly, writing sharp essays against racist violence, Jim Crow segregation, and the unequal treatment of blacks in the American military. He also established a poetry section to showcase black literary talent. The political and the artistic realms were equally important and intertwined, Johnson argued, for "the world does not know that a race is great until that race produces great literature." To that end, Johnson not only continued to produce song lyrics and poetry (a collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems, came out in 1917) but also encouraged other African American writers to succeed.

Impressed with the multitalented young editor, the NAACP's Joel Spingarn and W. E. B. Du Bois asked Johnson to work with them. In 1916 he became the association's first field secretary, responsible for the formation of new branch offices throughout the country.

While traveling in the South, Johnson recruited a young Atlantan, Walter White, who became one of the association's most important leaders. He also researched the lynchings and other racist violence that were beginning to increase in the years leading up to the Red Summer of 1919. Johnson himself had nearly suffered lynching when a group of white men saw him talking with a very fair-skinned black female journalist in 1901. Only the woman's insistence that she herself was African American saved him. Upon visiting the site where a black man had been burned alive for a crime Johnson believed the man could not have committed, Johnson realized, as he wrote in his autobiography, "that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America's body and white America's soul."

Despite antilynching activities as varied as the Negro Silent Protest Parade in 1917 and the 1919 publication of Thirty Years of Lynching (the product of research by Johnson and White, among others), in 1922 the NAACP saw the defeat of the Dyer Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime. Johnson had lobbied hard for its passage and was bitterly disappointed at its death by Southern Democratic filibuster and Northern Republican indifference. In his autobiography, though, he writes with characteristic optimism of the opportunity to make "the floors of Congress a forum in which [lynching was] discussed and brought home to the American people." While lynchings continued, their numbers did decrease dramatically following the public debate over the Dyer Bill.


In 1920 Johnson became NAACP secretary, the chief executive position within the association. His ten years in office were a decade of intense legal and organizational activity for the NAACP; for Johnson himself, it also heralded a period of prodigious literary output.

He edited three anthologies in the 1920s: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926). In addition, he published a second collection of poetry, God's Trombones (1927), and oversaw the reissue, this time under his own name, of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1927). After retiring from the NAACP in 1930, he published a work of social history, Black Manhattan (1930); a memoir, Along This Way (1933); and a collection of essays, Negro Americans, What Now? (1934). A third poetry collection, St. Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1935) also appeared.

In 1938, while vacationing in Maine, Johnson was killed in an automobile accident. He was 67.

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