James Weldon Johnson: NAACP Director, Garland Fund Director
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), was a musician, attorney and political agitator with the NAACP. He entered Atlanta University in 1897, left in 1894 to become a school principal in Jacksonville, and in 1901 became the first black to be admitted to the Florida bar.
In Jacksonville he founded a short-lived newspaper called The Daily American in 1895, and for ten years wrote editorials for the black newspaper “New York Age.” He formed a music association with younger brother J. Rosamond and they moved to New York to perform. They collaborated on a self-styled black national anthem called “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” an Afro-centric piece encouraging blacks to be “true to our God, true to our native land.” Johnson ironically would soon embrace communism which was a godless political theory and hostile toward religion.
Johnson obtained a Republican patronage position as consul to Venezuela through friend Booker T. Washington, and in 1909 was sent to Nicaragua, then to the Azores in 1913.
With the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the end of black favoritism in government appointments, Johnson left the State Department claiming racism in Wilson’s policies.
In 1911 he had published an autobiographical novel entitled “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” in which he espoused his views of race in America. Johnson held a personal contempt for white Americans, referring to them as “The White Witch,” his poem of the same name was a militant call for a black-centered consciousness and resistance to authority.
After Washington’s death in 1915 he joined with the NAACP and fell under the tutelage of black communist and “The Crisis” editor WEB DuBois. In 1916 he became a director (later executive secretary) of the NAACP and organized mass public disruption activities by blacks in both north and south. He was instrumental in bringing Walter White into the NAACP organization. White, along with New York black communist Manning Johnson and Howard University faculty would create the CPUSA subsidiary National Negro Congress (NNC) in the mid-1930’s.
Johnson coined the term “Red Summer” to describe the influence of the communists in the labor and race riots of the summer and fall of 1919 in America. The Party targeted blacks laborers for union recruitment during this time, with the NAACP falling under their influence as well.
Johnson was appointed to the board of the Garland Fund, and source of funding for militant labor and communist organizations and brainchild of Charles Garland, an eccentric, 21-year-old Harvard dropout. Johnson’s fellow directors represented a Who's Who of the radical Left: William Z. Foster, Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, Benjamin Gitlow, Scott Nearing, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Robert W. Dunn. The Garland Fund directors provided the NAACP with appropriations of $31,552 (1925-28), $7,365 (1923-24), and $5,000 (1929-30) in support of their operations.
Black poet and communist Langston Hughes thoroughly admired Johnson and admitted being influenced by his writings---Hughes would be awarded the NAACP’s “Spingarn Medal.” Black communist and mass public-disruption organizer Bayard Rustin claimed a close friendship with both DuBois and Johnson. Rustin organized the marches of A. Phillip Randolph and M.L. King.
As a close associate of WEB DuBois and his fellow directors in the Garland Fund, Johnson was enamored of the Soviet Union and communist political theory. He believed that Soviet-style collectivism would solve the racial problems in America and wrote that:
“I hold no brief against communism as a theory of government. I hope that the Soviet experiment will be completely successful. I know that it is having a strong influence on the principal nations of the world, including ours…the oppression and repression of the Jews has been greatly abated or wiped out by communism. Such an argument goes to prove the possibility that communism in the United States would wipe out oppression and repression of Negro Americans and give them a status of equality.
I grant the possibility---that if America should turn truly communistic (by which I mean, that we should adopt and practice communism without reservation, and not to adapt is as it has adapted democracy and Christianity so as to allow every degree of inequality and cruelty to be practiced under them); that if the capitalistic system should be abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat established, with the Negro aligned, as he naturally ought to be, with the proletariat, race discriminations would be officially banned and the reasons and feelings back of them would finally disappear” (Byrd).
In the 1930’s Johnson was referred to as an “elder statesman” of the communist-based civil rights movement and like DuBois, was immersed in a Soviet-style solution to what they viewed as a racist America. Johnson died violently in a car-train collision in Maine in 1938.
Sources:
The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Rudolph P. Byrd, editor, Modern Library, pp. 274-275
Wikipedia online
The Red Network, Elizabeth Dillings, 1934
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