The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, novel by James Weldon Johnson, published in 1912. This fictional autobiography, originally issued anonymously in order to suggest authenticity, explores the intricacies of racial identity through the eventful life of its mixed-race (and unnamed) narrator.
The narrator, born in Georgia, tells of his childhood in Connecticut, where his mixed-race mother, aided by monthly checks from the boy’s white father, is able to provide a secure and cultured environment. Learning of his black heritage only by accident, the narrator experiences the first of several identity shifts that will eventually find him opting for membership in white society. A European interlude under the sponsorship of a wealthy white male companion raises the question of sexual identity as well, but the novel never makes this issue explicit.
Throughout the work, Johnson employs characters, locales, incidents, and motifs from his own life, but the narrator is less a conscious self-portrait than a representation of the author’s own ambivalence.
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James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Negro National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson.
Johnson was appointed under President Theodore Roosevelt as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua for most of the period from 1906 to 1913. In 1934, he was the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically black university.
