James Weldon Johnson: Author Page
In 1927, Johnson published another volume of poetry -- in the forms of verse sermons -- called God's Trombones. A digital edition of that book is available here. It contains "The Creation," a poem Johnson had first published in 1920, and which was widely anthologized during the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida; his mother had migrated from the Bahamas, and had maternal ancestors who had emigrated from Haiti shortly after the Haitian revolution. For his undergraduate degree (1891-1894), Johnson attended Atlanta University, a Historically Black university.In 1897, Johnson passed the bar exam in Florida, becoming the first African American to be admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. This legal training served Johnson well in his political career: Johnson was appointed to serve as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua between 1906 and 1913 (and this experience is reflected in his writing -- several of his poems engage with Latin American issues). Johnson also occupied a position of prominence with the NAACP, serving as its executive director between 1920 and 1930.
Alongside his careers as a civil rights activist and poet/editor, Johnson also had a brief career as a songwriter. As is well known, Johnson and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, moved to New York together in the early 1890s, joining a wave of Black migration commonly known as the Great Migration. Together, the Johnson brothers were active songwriters, composing more than 200 songs, many of which were performed on Broadway.