and at Cleveland College of Music. She studied in
a number of fields, including violin, piano, and
voice, but as she increasingly immersed herself in
poetry, she decided against a career as a composer
or performer. Johnson taught school in Marietta,
Georgia, and for one year before her marriage was
appointed assistant principal at an Atlanta school.
In September 1903 she married Henry Lincoln
Johnson, a native of Augusta, Georgia, and a pub-
lic figure who enjoyed a 25-year career as “one of
the outstanding leaders of the negro race, who
served as Republican national committeeman from
Georgia, and was a delegate at large to all Republi-
can national conventions since 1896” (NYT, 11
September 1925, 23). Following his graduation
from Atlanta University in 1888, he went on to at-
tend law school at the University of Michigan and
graduated in 1892. In 1912, Henry Johnson was
appointed recorder of deeds, a historic post once
held by Frederick Douglass. He resumed his law
practice when his four-year appointment ended.
He continued to be an active member of the Re-
publican Party and national organization. He was
active in numerous organizations, including the
Colored Masons, the Colored Knights of Pythias,
the National Order of Colored Elks for whom he
served as grand legal adviser, and the Colored Odd
Fellows of the World for whom he served as master.
In September 1925, Henry Johnson suffered a fatal
“stroke of apoplexy” at the family home on S
Street. Following his death, Georgia Johnson ac-
cepted an appointment in the Labor Department
from President Calvin Coolidge, who wanted to
recognize her husband’s years of service to the
party. She eventually completed a biography of her
husband entitled The Black Cabinet, Being the Life
of Henry Lincoln Johnsonbut was unable to secure a
publisher for the work. Following her husband’s
death, Johnson sought a number of jobs to sustain
her family. As biographer Gloria Hull notes, she
was employed in a variety of federal agencies and
city departments, including the Public Schools De-
partment of the District of Columbia and different
offices within the Department of Labor.
Johnson’s two sons inherited her love of edu-
cation, and both parents ensured that both chil-
dren had ample opportunities to advance their
schooling. Their oldest son, Henry, attended Ash-
burnham Academy, Bowdoin College, and the law
school at HOWARDUNIVERSITY. The youngest son,
Peter, who died in 1957, attended Williston Semi-
nary, Dartmouth College, and the medical school
at Howard University.
Johnson’s emergence as a gifted poet pre-
ceded the Harlem Renaissance by a few years. Al-
though she had published poetical works as early
as 1905, she had to overcome her husband’s insis-
tence that she devote herself completely to do-
mestic and family matters. Johnson counteracted
the potential constraints that her husband placed
on her by insisting on the importance of her writ-
ing and by developing supportive relationships
outside of her marriage. Washington, D.C., did
provide her with meaningful artistic support net-
works, however. KELLYMILLER, dean at Howard
University and father of the writer May Miller Sul-
livan who later would befriend Johnson, encour-
aged her to share her works with the influential
literary critic WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE.
Positive responses from Braithwaite raised her self-
confidence, and she proceeded to publish works in
THECRISIS.She negotiated the social expectations
and her own professional ambitions and published
two important volumes of poems in 1918 and 1922.
She dedicated both of these books to her husband.
Following her husband’s death in 1925, she was able
to enjoy even more creative freedom and went on to
produce additional works of poetry, plays, and a bi-
ography of her husband. Her first book, THEHEART
OF AWOMAN, was marked for its works about
deeply emotional matters and, as critics noted, did
not include any poems dedicated strictly to racial
matters. Four years later, she responded to the criti-
cism and in BRONZE: A BOOK OFVERSEprovided
what she regarded as an “entirely racial” work
(Shockley, 348). Six years later, she published her
third collection of poems, AN AUTUMN LOVE
CYCLE.W. E. B. DuBois, with whom she had a close
relationship, provided the introduction for Bronze.
ALAINLOCKEprovided the foreword for An Au-
tumn Love Cycle,which was to be her final Harlem
Renaissance volume. In 1951, she published Share
My World: A Book of Poems,her last collection.
An earnest playwright, Johnson saw her status
boosted by her successful showing in literary con-
tests of the day. While she had been criticized for
her apolitical poetry, few could ignore the powerful
critiques of volatile race matters that Johnson284 Johnson, Georgia Douglas