because she allowed them to stay there when visit-
ing the Washington, D.C., area.
Despite her busy schedule, Johnson felt pas-
sionate about her writing. She wrote across genres,
producing four volumes of poetry: The Heart of
a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love
Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). Johnson
also wrote at least 28 plays, of which her antilynch-
ing plays remain most well known. These include
A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), Blue Blood
(1926), Safe (1929), and Blue Eyed Black Boy
(1930). Although many of her plays were lost by
the time of her death—along with her manuscript
about the famous literary salons she hosted in her
D.C. home, numerous short stories, and a novel—
many of her works have been found, including
three short stories, two of which were published in
Challenge (1936 and 1937).
Between 1926 and 1932, Johnson wrote a weekly
newspaper column titled “Homely Philosophy”
that appeared in 20 newspapers. Her other news-
paper columns include “Wise Saying” and “Beauty
Hints”; she also wrote a column for the New York
Amsterdam News. A trained musician, Johnson
used her talent in collaboration with Lillian Evanti
in the 1940s.
Thematically, Johnson wrote about justice,
love, displacement, power, isolation, and violence.
In developing these themes, she called attention
to the connections among race, class, and gender.
Overall, in her collections of poems The Heart of a
Woman and Autumn Love Cycle, Johnson explores
the tension between Victorian notions of woman-
hood and the emerging definition of womanhood
associated with the New Woman. She emphasizes
female sexuality and sensuality in some of her
poems. Johnson explores female desire and pas-
sion in poems such as “Afterglow,” “To a Young
Wife,” and the famous “I Want to Die While You
Love Me.”
In “The Heart of a Woman,” Johnson describes
the stifling effect of patriarchal society. “The heart
of a woman falls back with the night / And enters
some alien cage in its plight / And tries to for-
get it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks,
breaks, breaks, on the sheltering bars” (Honey, 66).
Although the speaker focuses on gender-specific
themes, many critics have drawn comparisons
between this poem and PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR’s
“Sympathy,” in which he uses the metaphor of the
caged bird to describe the experiences of African
Americans in general. As Claudia Tate, editor of a
collection of Johnson’s work, notes, Johnson “re-
fused to subscribe to a patriarchal sexuality that
designated women as male property” (Tate, 1997).
Although Johnson continues to show the inter-
sections of race, gender, and class in Bronze, she
foregrounds racial themes as well as the themes of
protest and violence. Bronze includes 65 poems in
which Johnson explores life as an African-Ameri-
can in a racist society that denies blacks their hu-
manity. In some of the poems in this collection
as well as those that appeared in The CRISIS and
COUNTEE CULLEN’s Caroling Dusk (1927), Johnson
overtly calls for resistance to such treatment. She
calls attention to the history and ludicrous nature
of American racism in poems such as “Common
Dust,” “Your World,” and “The True American.”
In her antilynching plays, Douglas Johnson fur-
ther develops the theme of violence and protest
along with other racial themes, including misce-
genation, racial passing, and race-based oppres-
sion. Moreover, she exposes the myth of the black
male rapist described earlier by Ida B. Wells (see
IDA B. WELLS-BARNET) in A Red Record (1895). In A
Sunday Morning in the South, Johnson shows how
easily innocent African-American men were often
accused of rape in order to justify white mob vio-
lence and lynching prevalent at the time she was
writing her antilynching plays. She illustrates the
impact of lynching on the African-American fam-
ily and community as a whole, in A Sunday Morn-
ing in the South and Safe, by demonstrating how
the virulent racism and socially and politically
condoned violence directed at African Americans
rendered them powerless. Johnson used her work
to expose these heinous crimes and call for justice.
Johnson also examines the plight of the black
maternal figure in these plays. First, she explores
the effects of rape on African-American women;
she looks specifically at the rape of African-Ameri-
can women by white men. She develops themes of
rape, miscegenation, and prejudice in Blue Eyed
Black Boy and Blue Blood, emphasizing the experi-280 Johnson, Georgia Douglas