Books by James Weldon Johnson

The author, the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP, offers a fictionalized account of his life and looks at the consequences of denying one's heritage.

This book is an emotionally gripping novel of a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. It's influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale. In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of racial identity imposed on black Americans.

In this classic work, first published in 1930, James Weldon Johnson, one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, combined the skills of the historian, the social scientist, ad the reporter to trace the New York black experience from the earliest settlements on Chatham Square during the pre-revolutionary period to the triumphant achievements of Harlem of the 1920s.

A landmark anthology of forty poets that brought serious attention to writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. The poetry, the prefaces, and Johnson's critical notes have made this book a classic. Indices.

The important African-American poet's complete works are collected here in the centenary year of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," his most important work. Original.

A poetic retelling of the creation story from Genesis, by a distinguished African-American poet and preacher, describes the making of the heavens and the earth, from the first light, to the coming of the animals, to the creation of humankind.

A single-volume compilation of some of the most important writings by the early twentieth-century African-American intellectual and activist features two short plays, the novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, poems from God's Trombones and St. Peter Relates an Incident, and important cultural and political essays. Original.

A celebration of African American achievement This portfolio of eighty-three photographs constitutes a stunning celebration of African American achievement in the twentieth century. Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), a longtime patron of black writers and artists, took these photographs over the course of three decades -- primarily as gifts to his subjects, such luminaries as W E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ruby Dee, Lena Horne, and James Earl Jones. The photographs Rudolph P. Byrd has selected for this volume come from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, which Van Vechten established at Yale University. Byrd has arranged the images chronologically, according to the time at which each subject emerged as a vital presence in African American tradition. Complementing the photographs are a substantial introduction by Byrd, biographical sketches of each subject, and poems by the noted writer Michael S. Harper. The result is a volume of beauty and power, a record of black excellence that will engage and inform new generations. "How vividly the pictures (reflect) the vitality of the black culture of their eras". -- Publishers Weekly "A visual and chronological history of the movers and shapers of the Harlem Renaissance.... A true history, and nonesuch other compilation exists". -- Quarterly Black Review of Books "Carl Van Vechten's portrait style -- formal, direct, and free of the extraneous-anticipated the celebrity photography of Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol". -- San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle "Carl Van Vechten's portraits of artists, athletes, academics, andactivists he respected ... reflect his appreciation of the diverse contributions of African Americans". -- Booklist

The lyrics to what has been called the African-American national anthem, as written by a turn-of-the-century civil-rights leader and poet, are combined with the illustrations of a two-time Coretta Scott King Award-winning artist. Reprint.

Provides an illustrated version of the song that has come to be considered the African-American national anthem, a song written in 1900 to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

A remarkable compendium of more than forty poems from a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance celebrates the triumphs of African Americans and offers a stunning indictment of racial injustice and prejudice, in a collection published to coincide with the centenary of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the AfricanAmerican National Anthem. Reprint.

Beautiful linocut prints accompany the stirring lyrics to the song that has become the national anthem of the African-American community. Reprint. AB. H.

Vintage and modern black-and-white photographs accompany this version of the song that has come to be considered the African American national anthem, in a book which celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of the song's creation.

Provides an illustrated version of the song that has come to be considered the African-American national anthem, a song written in 1900 to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday. 40,000 first printing.

The Autobiography of Booker T. Washington is a startling portrait of one of the great Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The illegitimate son of a white man and a Negro slave, Washington, a man who struggled for his education, would go on to struggle for the dignity of all his people in a hostile and alien society. W.E.B. DuBois's classic is a major sociological document and one of the momentous books in the mosaic of American literature. No other work has had greater influence on black thinking, and nowhere is the African-American's unique heritage and his kinship with all men so passionately described. Originally published anonymously, James Weldon Johnson's penetrating work is a remarkable human account of the life of black Americans in the early twentieth century and a profound interpretation of his feelings towards the w3hite man and towards members of his own race. No other book touches with such understanding and objectivity on the phenomenon once called "passing" in a white society. These three narratives, gathered together in Three Negro Classics, chronicle the remarkable evolution of African-American consciousness on both a personal and social level. Profound, intelligent, and insightful, they are as relevant today as they have ever been.