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James Weldon Johnson Research Paper

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African-American Racial Pride in James Weldon Johnson’s Literary Work James Weldon Johnson (1871 - 1938) was an important Black author, poet, leader, and political activist whose work was very influential in his time. He was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1871 to middle-class parents. In a long career he worked as a teacher, a lawyer, a diplomat and the executive officer of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). His literary works had a powerful influence on other African-American poets of the time, and those that followed him. His best known work is the hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is considered the Negro National Anthem. He wrote many other poems such as The Color Sergeant, To America, and The Creation. In these poems, he expresses the emotions and thoughts of African Americans. In The Color Sergeant, he uses images and metaphors to convey the bravery and pride of a colored American …show more content…

Johnson was consistently attentive to these issues throughout his life. In his autobiography, Along this Way, Johnson states, “I had in the main known my own people as individual or as groups; and now I began to perceive them clearly as a classified division, a defined section of American society ... what black and white meant stood out starkly.” According to Carroll A. Richards, he was influenced directly by the conditions of life for African-Americans in the rural South (347). Johnson tried to bring the determination of African-Americans against these barriers to the attention of the wider world. Allan H. Spear asserts that Johnson “was a part of the movement to create a positive and vital culture rooted in the folk experience of the Negro people” (Richards 344). He accomplishes this goal in To America through the use of symbols to express racial

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