Sewanee Review

The 1960s in America would have surprised James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), and they might have disappointed him for the way his struggles and accomplishments were counted for nothing by an African-American populace impatient with his conciliatory politics and systematic thinking. Less publicly vilified than Langston Hughes, Johnson had his life's work radically depreciated, often by neglect and pointed omission. Dismissed and forgotten was his successful plan, working through the naacp, to initiate and get enacted anti–Jim Crow laws and federal legislation with teeth; he helped bring an end to the widespread crime of lynching by painstakingly gathering and publicizing names and, perhaps more important, statistics. Dismissed with more virulence, however, were Johnson's early-in-the-century contributions to Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway theater—often collaborating with his brother on songs and musicals; only one example of which, the song "Under the Bamboo Tree," is included among his poems in this new edition. It did not help Johnson's cause in the 1960s, moreover, that he had written editorials opposing Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement.

What this appearance in the Library of America series, a volume judiciously edited by William L. Andrews, will do, ultimately, for [End Page xlvi] Johnson's literary reputation is anybody's guess. If the volume does not constitute canonization, it is an act of recognition of a writer who was both earnest and productive. Yet it cannot be said that Johnson's main preoccupation was his writing, for he had several honorable and successful careers—as teacher, diplomat with the U.S. consular service, newspaper editor, and, for decades, staff official of the naacp—that interested him every bit as much as his creative work. All this is documented in Johnson's evenhanded, moderately intoned autobiography, Along This Way (1933), published five years before his death. Included in its entirety, this work displays Johnson's practicality, good sense, and quiet ambition. It does not have the intellectual reach of The Education of Henry Adams or the delicious malice of the big-name gossip on which Stein trades in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. What it does do is present you with an honest, rational, accomplished human being who wishes to be taken exactly as he saw himself. There is no mythmaking of the self here: his account of a life of deeds and words speaks for itself.

Still, if writing was not the end-all and be-all of his life, at various times in his life he returned to it. He sometimes wrote for prizes or occasions, as in his long poem on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which appeared on the editorial page of the New York Times. He managed to put together three books of poetry, Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), God's Trombones (1927), and Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection (1930). Rationally conceived and carefully executed, his poems reflected none of the modernist concerns or ever more acceptable experiments. They received some praise, but that praise was mild, even, at times, condescending. Not merely condescending was Harold Rosenberg's attack in Poetry magazine in 1936 on the poem "Brothers—American Drama," an "account of the burning alive of a member of his race." Rosenberg calls it "a falsely conceived, slave-mongering piece of high-society propaganda, overlooking its lynch-condoning implications in order to raise the 'problem' of mass-servitude to a metaphysical height"—that "could only be constructed in the most wooden language imaginable." Rosenberg concludes, "Such being the condition of Mr. Johnson's talents, it is possible to respond favorably to his verses on two occasions only: when the great folk-song tradition of his people flows over his poetry, as in some of the dialect poems." Know your place, Johnson, is the message one is encouraged to infer. The poems in God's Trombones (1927) were not in the African-American "folk-song tradition" but—novel in form and "folk" content—they claimed a small place in the...