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My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.
James Weldon Johnson
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All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.
James Weldon Johnson
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I had enjoyed life in Paris, and, taking all things into consideration, enjoyed it wholesomely.
James Weldon Johnson
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The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.
James Weldon Johnson
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There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.
James Weldon Johnson
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My luck at the gambling table was varied; sometimes I was fifty to a hundred dollars ahead, and at other times I had to borrow money from my fellow workmen to settle my room rent and pay for my meals.
James Weldon Johnson
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A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.
James Weldon Johnson
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Evil is a force and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms
James Weldon Johnson
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When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over.
James Weldon Johnson
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Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.
James Weldon Johnson
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O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?
James Weldon Johnson
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But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.
James Weldon Johnson
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We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.
James Weldon Johnson
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Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson
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A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.
James Weldon Johnson
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Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation.
James Weldon Johnson
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At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes? I also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not be hampered by notes.
James Weldon Johnson
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And Satan smiled, stretched out his hand, and said,—
"O War, of all the scourges of humanity, I crown you chief."
James Weldon Johnson
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Whose starward eye
Saw chariot swing low? And who was he
That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh,
Nobody knows de trouble I see?
James Weldon Johnson
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The time of the psychological passing over from boyhood to manhood is a movable feast. The legal date fixed on the twenty-first birthday has little or no connection with it. There are men in their teens, and there are boys in their forties.
James Weldon Johnson
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The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of Morning blushing in the early skies.
James Weldon Johnson
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Some men enjoy the constant strife
Of days with work and worry rife,
But that is not my dream of life:
I think such men are crazy.
For me, a life with worries few,
A job of nothing much to do,
Just pelf enough to see me through:
I fear that I am lazy.
James Weldon Johnson
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And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.
James Weldon Johnson
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New York is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.
James Weldon Johnson
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And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely—
I'll make me a world."
James Weldon Johnson
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
James Weldon Johnson
Born:
June 17, 1871
Died:
June 26, 1938
(aged 67)
Bio:
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, and civil rights activist.
Known for:
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)
Black Manhattan (1930)
Fifty years & other poems (1917)
Along this way (1933)
Most used words:
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