There’s a lot to the life of James Weldon Johnson and I’m doing him a disservice just kinda glancing over his accomplishments… But this post was intended to focus primarily on his work, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

The song is the national anthem for African Americans and was something I took for granted without thinking much about it, or its author. But it occured to me I had no idea when it was written or why. Was there an event that triggered its writing?

James Weldon Johnson was a poet, writer, lawyer, diplomat and civil rights leader. He was born the second of three kids in Florida in 1871. His father, of mixed heritage and born free, worked as a waiter. Johnson’s mom was from the West Indies. She was a musician and taught public school and naturally encouraged her children to study music and read.

At age 16, Johnson went to college in Atlanta and wrote poetry– but poetry wasn’t his sole purpose. When he returned home to Florida he worked as principal of an elementary school and simultaneously studied law eventually becoming Florida’s first black lawyer. One of Johnson’s friends who worked in the law office told stories about passing as a white person. This friend would be the inspiration for Johnson’s famous novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

Johnson still worked as principal of an elementary school in 1900 when he wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing. The poem was written in acknowledgment of Lincoln’s birthday (Please note: Lincoln was born February 12) and as a way of introducing the days’ guest speaker, Booker T Washington. From my understanding the piece was read as a poem by 500 school children. It wouldn’t be set to music by Johnson’s brother until 1905.

In 1916, Johnson joined the NAACP as the groups first secretary. By 1919 the NAACP had christened the song The Negro National Anthem.

There’s a lot to Johnson’s story — here was a man with a lot of Firsts on his timeline. One of my favorites: Johnson helped inaugurate the first black newspaper published in the United States, the Daily American, though due to financial problems the paper was only published for about a year.

Johnson worked on Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1904 and was appointed US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. It was during those six years served he wrote The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912 with him stepping up to claim its authorship in 1927 and underscoring it was a fictional work.

In 1938, Johnson was killed in a car accident– his car was struck by a train during a heavy rainstorm. Johnson was 67. His funeral was attended by over 2000 people. He was buried with a copy of his own book of poems, God’s Trombones.

Appropriately here, consider another of Johnson’s poems– his funeral sermon, Go Down Death.