. .

Johnson transformed the folk sermons of the old-time preacher into beautiful and inspiring poetry. By preserving a race’s oral history, he single-handedly made these powerful sermons an important part of American literature.

We can also easily see Johnson as an “alchemist” in his Books of American Negro Spirituals. In this seminal work, initially published in two volumes (1925, 1926), Johnson adroitly delineates the origin, artistic character, and historical significance of the spirituals. The renowned poet Carl Sandburg described Johnson’s interpretation of this African-American art form as “the best statement and explanation of the singing of the spirituals that I have ever seen.” Johnson wrote about the creative genius of the slaves in his poem “O Black and Unknown Bards”:

O Black and unknown bards of long ago,

How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

How, in your darkness, did you come to know

The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?

Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?

Who first from out the still watch, lone and long?

Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise

Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?

 

Heart of what slave poured out such melody

As “Steal Away to Jesus”? on its strains

His spirit must have nightly floated free,

Though still about his hands he felt his chains.

Who heard great “Jordan Roll”? . . .

Johnson reveals in “O Black and Unknown Bards” African Americans as creators of the Negro spirituals who lived and died captives of a system of slave labor. He wrote pointedly, “But from whom did these songs spring—these songs unsurpassed among the folk songs of the world and, in the poignancy of their beauty, unequalled?” Johnson noted that when white America first heard the spirituals, they felt sympathy for the poor Negroes. By the 1920s he asserted that white Americans felt not pity but deference to the creative genius of the race. For Johnson this was yet another realization of black literature’s power and its effect on race relations.

Because Johnson was able to bring white and black America together through his literary and other writings, I think of him as a linking agent for black America. He reduced and overcame many of the barriers that had made communication across the races so difficult, and that had long prevented the smooth and efficient transfer of knowledge. His ability to be an effective link was due to his deftness at blending two cultures in his literary works. For example, in God’s Trombones he built on a premise that allowed him to fuse two traditions: He used the tradition of standard Bible English to express the developing black ethos. This fusion enabled him to establish a tradition that he called conscious art reared on the foundation of black folk art. He wrote, “When a Negro author does write so as to fuse white and black America into one interested and approving audience he has performed no slight feat, and has most likely done a sound piece of literary work.” The noted philosopher Alain Locke maintained that Johnson’s literary works were racial in substance but universal in appeal.

Further testament to Johnson’s role as link between white and black America are his numerous essays published in white journals and newspapers, including The Nation, Century, Harper’s, The American Mercury, The New York Times, and The Herald Tribune. Concurrently, his writings were appearing in black journals and newspapers, including The Crisis, The New York Amsterdam News, and Opportunity. In writing for two audiences, Johnson never missed an opportunity to do two things: interpret the cultural contributions of his race and extol black literature as an integral part of American literature. He consistently pointed out to both white and black Americans that “it is more or less generally acknowledged that the only things artistic that have sprung from American soil and out of American life, and been universally recognized as distinctively American products, are the folk creations of the Negro.”

As New York University’s first African-American professor, Johnson was the first of his race to teach African-American literature at a white university. Before Johnson died in 1938, Dean George Payne of New York University had worked with him to develop a special program that would have authorized Johnson to teach black literature at other universities across the nation on behalf of New York University. Thus, had he lived, African-American studies would have begun by the 1930s.

As a link, Johnson attempted to connect all Americans through literature by debunking the stereotypes about his people. Further, he used literature to call attention to the urgent political and social plight of black Americans. His novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), relates the life of a character of mixed ancestry who passes for white. Addressing the subject of “passing” was not Johnson’s true objective. Rather, he was addressing the social and political injustices that made “passing” a way out. He wanted to emphasize in this novel that, in America, the very fact that a person is black is adequate information to determine what should be thought of him and how he should be treated, that white America sees little need to find out who a black person is, or what his talents, interests, ambitions, and thoughts might be.1

 

In 1917 Johnson produced his first book of poetry, Fifty Years and Other Poems. This volume established him as the most celebrated African-American poet since Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar, who died in 1906, had written only in dialect, which was wholly accepted by white Americans. But Johnson decided that dialect was too narrow a medium to express the fullness of black life. Dialect, Johnson wrote, “is an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos.” He further contended that the black poet “needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and which will be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations” of a people. Johnson, in Fifty Years and Other Poems, presents poems both in dialect and in traditional English, but which are racial in substance. His friend and literary mentor, Columbia University’s Brander Matthews, describes this book as “a cry for recognition, for sympathy, for understanding, and above all, for justice.”

Johnson edited the first black anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry, in 1922.