NYC MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS | NAACP's James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson, c. 1917.

July 28, 2020—On this day in 1917, 10,000 Blacks organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Credit for this is given to novelist-poet-songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who was also a lawyer, a U.S. consul overseas and a leader of the NAACP.

Behind the scenes at the NAACP was Inez Milholland Boissevain's father, John E. Milholland, who was the NAACP's first Treasurer. Inez, of course, died in 1916 and her father would still be grieving.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a hotel headwaiter and his mother was a teacher at the segregated Stanton School, which  Johnson attended until he went to his school. He grew up in a middle-class home, and his mother encouraged him to pursue his interests in reading and music.

Johnson attended high school and college at Atlanta University. He received his bachelor’s degree 1894. After college, Johnson became the principal of Stanton School, and expanded the school to include a high school. He also began studying law.  In 1898, he was admitted to the Florida Bar, the first Black person to be admitted.

Johnson continued to serve as principal and began practicing law. In addition, he wrote  poetry and songs. In 1901, Johnson decided to pursue a career in writing. He and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, left for New York City to write songs for musicals. They composed about two hundred songs for Broadway.
I
n New York, Johnson also became involved in politics. In 1904, he served as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club. In 1906, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Johnson as the United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he served as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua until 1913. In addition to his service as consul, during this time, Johnson anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).

In 1916, Johnson accepted the position of field secretary for the NAACP.  He worked at opening new branches and expanding membership. In 1920, the NAACP appointed him executive secretary. In this position, he was able to bring attention to racism, lynching and segregation. After ten years of serving as executive secretary, Johnson accepted a creative writing teaching position at Fisk University.

Johnson developed his own philosophy on lessening racism in America. While W.E.B. Du Bois advocated intellectual development and Booker T. Washington advocated industrial training to combat racism, Johnson believed it was important for Blacks to produce great literature and art. By doing so, Johnson held that Blacks could demonstrate their intellectual equality and advance their placement in America. 

One of his more popular works was God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). In 1927, he also reissued his first novel under his own name. Johnson died in 1938, after a train hit the car his wife was driving.

Sources: NAACP History.

19th Amendment Passed Congress in 1919

Garrison Keillor's excellent daily email announces today (June 4) that "On this date in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate and gave American women the right to vote." Actually, the right to vote wasn't obtained for another year and three months, when Tennessee was the last required state to ratify the 19th Amendment, in August 1920. Keillor's summary is well-drafted:

Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere. But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both Houses of Congress the following May.

The question that Keillor does not address is: Why did Wilson endorse the suffrage amendment in 1918? He opposed it in the election of 1916. The suffragists said that year: "He kept out og war, and he kept us out of suffrage." Wilson reversed himself in 1917 on the war, and in 1918 on suffrage. The reason for Wilson's reversal was ostensibly the partnership of women in the war effort. But a more plausible reason is that public opinion had become solidly pro-suffragist because of the brutal treatment of women in the prisons to which they were taken and force-fed after they took up a silent vigil in front of the White House. This vigil in turn was started immediately after Wilson insulted a delegation of women in January 1917 when they came with 250 memorials from women's groups around the country using Inez Milholland Boissevain's death to argue that the President should revisit his opposition to suffrage. More on Inez Milholland at www.boissevain.us.