Poet · Harlem Renaissance
James Weldon Johnson
American poet · 1871–1938
James Weldon Johnson was a school principal in Jacksonville, Florida, when he wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" for a Lincoln's birthday celebration in 1900; his brother J. Rosamond set it to music, and five hundred schoolchildren gave the first performance. The NAACP later adopted it, and it has been known ever since as the Black national anthem.
Johnson seemed to live five lives at once: the first Black lawyer admitted to the Florida bar since Reconstruction, a Broadway songwriter, US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP.
God's Trombones (1927), his verse sermons in the voice of the old Black preachers — including "The Creation" — is his poetic masterpiece, and a bridge between folk tradition and the Harlem Renaissance.
James Weldon Johnson's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Lift Every Voice and Sing1900
Lift ev'ry voice and sing,Till earth and heaven ring,
Written for a Lincoln's-birthday school celebration in 1900 and set to music by Johnson's brother J. Rosamond, this is the poem the NAACP adopted as the Black national anthem. Its three stanzas move from song, through the 'stony road' and 'chastening rod' of remembered suffering, to a closing prayer for faithfulness — a national hymn that never once raises its voice in anger.
Read the full poem →The Creation1920
And God stepped out on space,And He looked around and said:
The centerpiece of God's Trombones (1927), Johnson's cycle of verse sermons in the cadence of the old Black folk preachers. God, 'lonely,' rolls light from darkness and scoops the clay of the first man 'like a mammy bending over her baby.' Johnson captures the rhythm and grandeur of the spoken sermon without using dialect — a deliberate, dignifying choice.
Read the full poem →O Black and Unknown Bards1908
O black and unknown bards of long ago,How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
A sonnet-like tribute to the anonymous enslaved singers who created the spirituals. Johnson asks how unschooled, unnamed people produced music of such genius — 'Steal Away,' 'Swing Low' — and answers that their art is its own monument. It is both elegy and act of recovery, naming a debt American culture had refused to acknowledge.
Read the full poem →