James Weldon Johnson (1871¿1938) was an American civil rights activist and writer. He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was the first African-American professor at New York University. As a writer, Johnson was well-known in the Harlem Renaissance for his novels and poems which dealt primarily with black culture. In ¿The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man¿, Johnson offers a fictional account of a biracial man living in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who attempts to pass as a white man to ensure his safety and future prospects. Read & Co. Classics is republishing this classic novel now in a new addition complete with the poem ¿At the Closed Gate of Justice¿ by James D. Corrothers.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 216 mm
Breite: 140 mm
Dicke: 8 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-5287-1800-4 (9781528718004)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was an American author and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 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 rose to become one of the most successful officials in the organization. He traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, for example, to investigate a brutal lynching that was witnessed by thousands. His report on the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the burning-to-death of Ell Persons was published nationally as a supplement to the July 1917 issue of the NAACP's Crisis magazine, and during his visit there he chartered the Memphis chapter of the NAACP. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture.
He was appointed under President Theodore Roosevelt as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua for most of the period from 1906 to 1913. In 1934 he was the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically black university. Johnson died in 1938 while vacationing in Wiscasset, Maine, when the car his wife was driving was hit by a train. His funeral in Harlem was attended by more than 2000 people. Johnson's ashes are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
