This volume consists of a collection of poems by African-American poets from 1750 to the 1920s. By including such poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar, James David Corrothers, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, Johnson reveals the undeniable creative genius of black artists and their irrefutable contribution to American literature. In the noted preface to this volume, Johnson offered an explanation for the work:

There is perhaps, a better excuse for giving an Anthology of American Negro Poetry to the public than can be offered for many of the anthologies that have recently been issued. The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets—to supply this lack of information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody’s effort. . . .

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.2

Johnson’s third volume of poetry, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (1935), is a tribute to black patriotism as well as an indict ment of racial inequities. These poems can be viewed within two contexts. The first consists of poems built upon racial themes but having some universal appeal—mainly protest poems and poems in dialect. The second is comprised of themes expressing entirely universal sentiments.

If I had to define the feelings, ideas, and thoughts of James Weldon Johnson as a litterateur and poet in one word, it would be universality. “Universality” because of his belief that it is through the production and interpretation of a race’s literature and other creative expressions that a people can begin to break down the stereotypical conceptions that are so inherent in universal thought.

In his own literary canon, Johnson demonstrates that no one race can lay claim to universality. In “O Black and Unknown Bards,” his prototypes of faceless and nameless slaves come to life as representatives of a universal human condition. In this poem and in much of his other literary writings, we see Johnson using the particular to explain the universal. And he concurrently uses the universal to explain the particular. “O Black and Unknown Bards” accentuates the unique creative genius of a people who, while enslaved, transformed their condition into the Negro spirituals. The slaves had brought forth such melodies as “Steal Away Jesus,” “Go Down, Moses,” and “In Dat Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’.” Johnson contended that the imagination of the “Black and Unknown Bards” was sparked by the vivid biblical stories they heard. They fused these stories with the suffering and pathos of their own lives in musical form. These creators didn’t record their creations themselves, but Johnson became the instrument for reproducing the black racial spirit in literary art form.

His success as a poet is mainly anchored in the oral traditions of his people. He realized that it was only by relying on these sources—sometimes symbolic—that a people could withstand racism. The African-American tradition as conceived by Johnson was dependent on its ability to relate itself to the human situation of oppressed people in general and black people in particular. The extent that Johnson conveyed this empathy is the extent to which he can be said to be really successful.

Assuredly the African-American tradition in American literature has its paternity more in James Weldon Johnson than in anyone else. As poet-writer Sterling Brown once said, “By his interpretations of Negro poetry and music, by occasional essays on the problems of Negro writers, and by his own creative work, James Weldon Johnson succeeded more than any predecessor in furthering the cause of Negro artists.” Alain Locke postulated that “Mr. Johnson brought, indeed, the first intellectual substance to the content of our poetry.” In 1935 Johnson’s NAACP successor, Walter White, wrote, “There is hardly a Negro artist who is not indebted to [ Johnson] for spiritual and material assistance.”

Although Johnson was a giant in sophisticated literary circles, he accomplished even more in the arena of civil rights. As leader of the NAACP during the 1920s, he sat at the center of black thought and action while giving direction and voice to the association’s burgeoning movement of racial uplift. The fact that he could be a leader concurrently of the Harlem Renaissance and of the NAACP during the 1920s illustrates how closely the goals of the two movements conformed. It is this highly effective double role that distinguishes James Weldon Johnson as one of the exceptional figures of the twentieth century.

The poetry presented here represents Johnson’s faith in literature as a means of diminishing racial prejudice. Moreover, much of his poetry underscores his inexorable faith in the founding principles of America while he extols a race in what he called “a work so glorious.”

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

WORKS BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson.