Johnson, James Weldon (1871-1938)

US writer, lawyer, diplomat, and social critic. He was a strong supporter of President Theodore Roosevelt and served him and President Taft as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua 1906-12. He was editor of New York Age 1912-22 and was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a poet and anthropologist, he became one of the chief figures of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. His major work, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, was published anonymously in 1912 and republished under his own name in 1927. The Book of the American Negro Poetry (1922) edited by Johnson, was the first anthology of African-American poetry. His autobiography Along This Way was published in 1933.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, and educated at Atlanta University, Johnson became the first black American admitted to the Florida bar in 1897.