James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American writer, lawyer and civil rights activist born in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the first Executive Secretary of the NAACP and was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known works include The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, republished in 1927), the poetry collection God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and the anthology he compiled and edited, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).