James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the fictional account of the life of a young American man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With his bi-racial heritage, the Ex-Colored Man is faced with the choice of embracing his black culture and its ragtime music, or passing as a white man and living a mediocre middle-class existence. While not actually an autobiography, Johnson based the book on his
...The work of James Weldon Johnson (1871 - 1938) inspired and encouraged the artists of the Harlem Renaissance,a movement in which he himself was an important figure. Johnson was active in almost every aspect of American civil life and became one of the first African-American professors at New York University. He is best remembered for his writing, which questions, celebrates and commemorates his experience as an African-American.