He later wrote in his autobiography, “in all of my
experience it was this period that marked... the
beginning of my knowledge of my own people
as a ‘race’ ” (119). After graduating from Atlanta
University, a HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGE, John-
son accepted a position as principal of the Stanton
School in Jacksonville and established it as the first
black high school in Florida. In 1898, he passed the
Florida state bar exam—the first African American
to do so—but rather than practice law or continue
his administrative position at Stanton, he moved to
New York City and began collaborations with his
brother and Bob Cole. Together they formed the
popular Broadway songwriting team Cole and the
Johnson Brothers, which catered to Broadway au-
diences in innovative ways; they prospered for four
years. Professionalism is an unremitting theme in
Johnson’s writing, and the success of Cole and the
Johnson Brothers symbolized the team’s deliberate
project to raise the “status of the Negro as a writer,
composer, and performer in the New York theater
and world of music” (Along This Way 172–173).
In 1905, Johnson toured Europe, and after a
year there he decided to pursue a career in dip-
lomatic service. He received his first post in 1906
as a United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Ven-
ezuela. Three years later he was commissioned to
head the United States Consulate in Corinto, Ni-
caragua. While in Nicaragua, he began writing po-
etry, which he published in The Century Magazine
and The Independent. In 1910, he married Grace
Nail, who had grown up in a traditional, middle-
class black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Continu-
ing to write poetry through this period, Johnson
revisited the manuscript of a novel he had begun
years earlier while studying literature at Columbia
University with Brander Matthews, who had read
the first two chapters of the manuscript and en-
couraged Johnson to keep writing.
In 1912, Johnson anonymously published the
novel under the title The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man. In this novel, Johnson’s anonymous
narrator, a musician and composer, comes to
grips with his biracial identity by eventually pass-
ing for white. Though poorly received in its first
printing, when scant attention was paid to Afri-
can-American novels, some critics today consider
it the finest American novel of the 1910s. Alfred
Knopf, whose imprint published many HARLEM
RENAISSANCE texts in the 1920s, republished the
novel in 1927 at the height of the New Negro
Renaissance. By then the public was eager for
African-American writing, and the novel was an
enormous success. In this later edition, Johnson’s
name appeared prominently on the dust jacket,
and he received numerous letters from a confused
public inquiring about various periods of his life.
“That is, probably,” he admits in his autobiogra-
phy, Along This Way, “one of the reasons why I am
writing the present book” (239).
Johnson quit the Foreign Service in 1913 and
became a columnist for the New York Age, a black-
run newspaper that supported BOOKER T. WASH-
INGTON over DuBois in the famous debate over
the two politicians’ disparate methods of activism.
Johnson chose the finer points from each side in
an attempt to reconcile seemingly irreconcil-
able differences. In 1916 he became the national
organizer of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP) and
within four years transformed that organization
from one with three full-time staff members and a
membership of less than 9,000 to one that boasted
165 branches and 44,000 members nationwide.
In 1920, he became the first African American to
head the NAACP.
During the 1920s, the decade of the Harlem
Renaissance, then called the New Negro Renais-
sance, Johnson took a pragmatic look back in
African-American history to find a usable past
upon which to buttress the authority and legiti-
macy of African-American art forms in his own
time. Many of his findings are collected in The
Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and The
Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926).
His preface to The Book of American Negro Po-
etry is foremost a pronouncement that African-
American poetry and music are “the only things
artistic that have yet sprung from American soil
and been universally acknowledged as distinctive
American products” (quoted in Andrews, xiv).
African-American culture, he maintained, was
the only singularly American culture uncompro-
mised by European influences. The preface chartsJohnson, James Weldon 283