James Weldon Johnson entered the world on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, a bustling port city where the St. Johns River met the Atlantic and where the scars of Reconstruction still lingered in the humid air. He left it on June 26, 1938, in a car accident near Wiscasset, Maine, at the age of sixty-seven, his body laid to rest in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Between those dates stretched a life of astonish…
“The Negro's greatest contribution to American civilization has been in the field of music.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing
James Edwin Campbell was born on September 28, 1867, in Pomeroy, Ohio, and died there on January 26, 1896, before he had reached his twenty-ninth birthday. His life was brief, but it was unusually full: he was a teacher, school principal, educational organizer, newspaper editor, essayist, public speaker, and poet. Most enduringly, he was an important early African American literary artist whose poems preserved the sp…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sensuality, Joy
