Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
When Johnson graduated from Atlanta University in 1894 he attended the Chicago World’s Fair and heard presentations by Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Douglass’s commitment to uplift and Dunbar’s mastery and respect for language, black speech, and culture reflected two aspects of Johnson’s life and talent that would be consistent throughout his many professional successes.
Johnson, who became principal of Stanton School in Jacksonville that same year, expressed his views on the conditions of blacks in the rural South and set about to educate the adult black community by founding the newspaper The Daily American. Finding he had further talents in the area of music, Johnson spent time on Broadway writing songs with his brother, John Rosamond Johnson.
Concerned about stereotypes prevalent in popular music, he took courses at Columbia University to further explore his literary interests. While serving as treasurer of the Colored Republican Club in New York, he accepted a diplomatic post in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in 1906 and later transferred to Corinto, Nicaragua, in 1909. He completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) while in Nicaragua and had it published anonymously. After resigning from diplomatic service in 1913, Johnson returned to the states.
James Weldon Johnson (Fisk University).
Becoming an editorial writer for the periodical New York Age, he continued to advocate for equal rights. In 1916 Joel E. Spingarn, who served as chair and then president of the NAACP, offered Johnson a position as the NAACP’s first field secretary. In this office, Johnson organized branches in the South and led protests against injustices. In 1919 he led a delegation to see President Woodrow Wilson to protest death sentences given to black soldiers after the Houston, Texas, race riots of 1917. Also in 1919, having proven himself an effective organizer and spokesman for the cause of civil rights, Johnson became general secretary of the NAACP. Johnson worked relentlessly, investigating injustices and championing voting rights. The overall demands of this position took a toll on Johnson, however, and he took a leave of absence on two occasions because of exhaustion.
Johnson resigned from the position as general secretary in 1930 and devoted himself to his writing on a full-time basis, while still championing the cause of civil rights. In his writings, he advocated integration as the solution to segregation and America’s race problems. He saw the inequities in the American system and found his voice in the traditions of black culture to express and explore the history, experience, and opportunities deserved by black Americans. Johnson died on June 26, 1938, but he left a lasting legacy as a renaissance man with a vested interest in the rights of his people.
Lean’tin L. Bracks
McKay, Claude (1890?–1948)
Claude McKay is best known as a poet and writer of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay, a native of Jamaica, came to America in 1911 to earn a degree in agriculture. After transferring from the Tuskegee Institute to Kansas State College, he headed to New York in 1914 to pursue a literary career. Racial conflicts were happening more and more during that time as a response to the immigration of blacks from the South to the North. As a result there were as many as two dozen race riots that year across the country in which blacks were the victims. McKay wrote in The Liberator one of his most memorable poems, “If We Must Die,” in response to a race riot in Chicago. He charged blacks to fight back against the forces that would destroy them. McKay’s work celebrated the working class, represented blacks in America, sought to correct stereotypes prevalent in literature, and addressed political and social concerns such as racism.
Lean’tin L. Bracks
Sanchez, Sonia (1934–)
Sanchez’s commitment to civil rights and the improved quality of life for African Americans permeates her work. Her interest in poetic expression to effect change began as early as six while she was under the care of her maternal grandmother. Her interest in verse continued through to college, when she took creative writing classes, and later postgraduate work at New York University, where she studied with Louise Bogan. Her poetic expressions during the 1960s gave voice to the turbulence of the time and the unjust treatment that was pervasive in the black community. Sanchez was an influential member of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement. While serving as an active member of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), Sanchez met Malcolm X. She learned a lot about language from Malcolm X through his direct and truthful approach, later applying that knowledge to her poetry. Sanchez has published numerous works of poetry that address social and political concerns impacting civil rights and the quality of life for African Americans.
Lean’tin L. Bracks
Cities and Towns
Black Migration to Northern States
Before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation ended plantation slavery in the South, fugitive slaves in most cases headed north to seek freedom. The largest migration movements occurred in twenty-year cycles, beginning with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which generated mass travel on the Underground Railroad. In 1870 the aftermath of the Civil War caused many to leave the South, while the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, World War I (1914–1918), and America’s entry into World War II (1941–1945) also generated interest among blacks seeking industrial work in the North. The Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper founded by Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, became a leading voice in promoting the “Negro Exodus” to northern states, described as the “promised land” and “New Canaan.” The newspaper was also known for its strong attacks against racial prejudice and discrimination. When blacks moved north, they encountered densely populated urban environments and struggled for fair treatment in employment, housing, education, and other concerns. Northward migration continued to be a viable option until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s brought major social changes to the South.
Fletcher F. Moon
Jamestown, Virginia
In August of 1619, twelve years after English colonists established the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown received Africans as involuntary laborers. The 20 Africans who were put ashore by the captain of a Dutch ship were not slaves in the legal sense, but rather indentured servants, who, like their European counterparts, became free after their contractual period ended. The colony’s inhabitants, however, did not appear to grasp the all-encompassing effect of the induction of Africans into the fledgling colony. As an institution, slavery did not exist in the colony. As an economic system the “peculiar institution,” as slavery came to be called, developed gradually from indentured servitude to lifelong and heritable bondage as Virginia increasingly failed to meet its labor needs with Native Americans and indentured servants.
Once the Virginia colony recognized that blacks could not easily escape without being identified, could be strictly controlled and persecuted because they were not Christians, and seemed available in endless supply, the colony felt it had found the answer to its labor shortage problem. Like other colonies, Virginia had no statutes against the perpetual and inherited servitude of people from the continent of Africa or of African descent. While Jamestown, Virginia, was the first of the North America British colonies to receive Africans as involuntary laborers, it was not the first colony to codify the institution of slavery. Massachusetts preceded Virginia by twenty years when its code of laws, the Body of Liberties, recognized the enslavement of Africans as not only legal but also moral in 1641.
Virginia was evolving into a slave society with a racially based system of thralldom …