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This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened awareness he brought to the bountiful riches of African American music that helped inspire the Composer-Collector generation — James Weldon Johnson, James Rosamond Johnson, W. C. Handy, Ernest Hogan, and Will Marion Cook — are detailed. It discusses the search for and emergence of a “New African-American Orchestra”, Ford Dabney's theater “roof-top” bands, Hogan and Cook's “Memphis Students Band”, Europe's “Clef Club”, and Cook's “Southern Synchopaters” orchestra, preparing the way for Duke Ellington, “a world-class composer, who stands alone as the foremost American genius who remained loyal to the improvisational, tonal, and rhythmic endowments of African American music”. His universe was an “orchestra” of brilliant jazz artists, one he never found wanting. With a light but firm tether, he drew and followed them along a trail of discovery, leaving glorious artifacts in his path.

This chapter explores the interracial mixing among Indians and blacks and its embodiment of miscegenation in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reads Pauline Hopkins’s serialized novel Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) and Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative musical, The Red Moon (1908), both of which responded to the heightened polarization of black and white by employing the social reality of racial hybridity as well as complex Afro-Indian relations to unsettle the monolithic narratives of black-white relations. In addition to staging miscegenation in multiple geographic sites, Winona and The Red Moon took into account the histories and contemporaneous patterns of migration and immigration, played out new visions of interracial and intercultural dynamics in the context of U.S. cultural and imperial politics, reconceptualized the bifurcated portrait of U.S. race relations, and provided an alternative platform for imagining citizenship and nation making.

This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a time when the nature and purpose of that creativity were much debated. James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois in particular had much to say about the role of the arts and, in the case of the latter, about the relationship between art and propaganda. The NAACP could be criticized for overstating the importance and value of art and literature to ordinary African Americans, but it was not alone in hoping that a demonstration of black artistic talent could begin to chip away at racial prejudice.

This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.

This chapter focuses on James Weldon Johnson and his quest to achieve cultural uplift for African Americans during the “nadir” of race relations in the ’teens. It argues that ragtime music—a much-adulterated and much recorded mass cultural form—was at the center of Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, passages from which were reused in his essays and prefaces about black contributions to the arts. Johnson creates a virtual voice in his novel that mimics the “phonographic” logic of ragtime itself. The voice signifies the unspeakable legacies of slavery through its very inarticulacy, while simultaneously acting as a crucible for interpretative possibility.

This chapter explores how Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson staged the transnational and diasporic contours of miscegenation through their works: Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, respectively. Through their creative reconceptualizations of the black-white binary, Hopkins and Johnson emphasized the elasticity of the definitions used to organize and understand the messy intersections of race, nation, gender, and class. They embraced the hybridization of the black population and of other non-Anglo and multiracial communities; their work illuminated the representational potential of interracial mixing, as well as the national and global implications that were so often subsumed by the overriding black-white divide. At the same time, however, Hopkins and Johnson employed radical stagings of miscegenation to promote and legitimize the visible and palpable presence of a diverse black population and to document the vital historical and contemporaneous societal contributions of the black diaspora.

America's entry into war on April 2, 1917, turned Mencken's life upside down. As a German-American now writing for the New York Evening Mail, he became the target of super-patriots. George Creel launched the Espionage Act, containing some of the broadest and most restrictive sanctions against civil liberties and free speech that the country ever witnessed. As a German-American who felt separated from American society, Mencken began to gain insight on another group he had derided years earlier: African-Americans. Together with James Weldon Johnson, they urged black Americans to start writing realistically about racial issues, including lynching. Mencken also met Philip Goodman, and wrote A Book of Prefaces and Damn a Book of Calumny, both of which attacked American literature and conformity head on.

This chapter offers an extended portrait of a persistent pairing—of church and spirit—that appeared in so much of black writing during the 1920s. Special attention is paid to several of the texts that were considered central to the making of a Negro Renaissance in New York during the decade, as examples of how New Negro writers imagined a racial spirit. By all accounts a theological discourse, the frequent pairing of church and spirit provided an analytical frame through which to make sense of a novel black cultural pluralism, but also as a means for disciplining religious practices in accordance with an ethic of racial uplift. Through a close engagement with Alain Locke’s editorial process in compiling the period’s pivotal text The New Negro (1925), along with several key essays written by some of the period’s most prominent black artists and intellectuals (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, George Edmund Haynes, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, and James Weldon Johnson), this chapter reveals a spiritual grammar at the very center of the cultural imagining of the New Negro.

This chapter brings together the stories of the travels of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, and Malcolm X in an attempt to explore what their perspectives might portend for political theory and US public philosophy as these struggle to reconcile the conflicting obligations of national and world citizenship. It then considers how Douglass, Johnson, and Malcolm would enter the conversation between Nussbaum and her critics. On the one hand, they would share Balfour's view that the particularities of history should not be erased by principles claiming to be universal, and that political theory itself must take care to recall its own historical situatedness. On the other hand, Douglass and Malcolm would agree with Nussbaum that some conception of universal moral truth is necessary to US democracy, and indeed to moral life of any kind.

Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.

This chapter describes the personal history of the author and composer of Lift Every Voice and Sing: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. It situates the composition of the song in the context of the social and political movements of African Americans in the midst of the development of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, with a particular focus on Associational Life and the development of formal rituals. It traces how Lift Every Voice and Sing became known as the Negro National Anthem.

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.

Paul Robeson won Phi Beta Kappa honors and oratorical and debating prizes and was named All-American in football and class valedictorian at Rutgers. By then, he had found, among southern blacks, main sources of black genius in the arts, which he later illustrated during the Negro Renaissance. A declared socialist after arriving in England in the late twenties, he celebrated values common to the people, and this was reflected in songs he sang in many languages to universal acclaim. In addition to Chinese, Greek and Russian, he was a brilliant student of African languages at the London School of Oriental Languages and was invited to join the West African Student Union, a rare honor. Though possibly the greatest artist in the world, he was persecuted in the United States because he firmly opposed both colonialism and racism. He favored Negro students studying abroad and thereby being rescued from American racism.

This chapter begins by discussing the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the subsequent reaction of the black community to this extra-legal violence. In the aftermath of the lynching Church and his friend James Weldon Johnson used the platform of the Lincoln League to rally more support from black voters in the city, and helped to establish an NAACP branch in Memphis. As a result, Church would be named the director of the NAACP’s southern branches, thus cementing his legacy as a local leader.

This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.

This chapter links the terms derived from what is essentially a literary reading of Fanon's mid-20th-century theoretical and activist texts to an attempt to derive theory from a literary scene of lynching in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). It focuses on how the representation of the Ex-Coloured Man's traumatic response to the lynching he witnesses enacts one of the chief symptoms, and puissant forms, of the black power explicated in Chapter 1: temporal dispersal, hostility toward, as Fanon describes it, “conformity to the categories of time.” Though the novel is designed as a narrative of failure in many senses, peripheral suggestions of actions alternative to those the narrator chooses emerge in the miscegenation with which the novel concludes—this miscegenation is at once denied (the Ex-Coloured Man passes as white) and affirmed (not only because he is a once-colored man but also through his desire for his white wife's desire for his black boyhood friend, Shiny)—possibilities that, if consciously embraced, would position the Ex-Coloured Man as a kind of race- and family-terrorist.

This chapter discusses the issue of interracial unions and suggests that the simultaneous threat and possibility the idea poses remain central to explorations of race in America in the twenty-first century. James Weldon Johnson reminds us that our cultural obsession with sex—talking about it, prohibiting it, circumventing it, exhibiting it—is what drives the nation’s passionate cultural preoccupation with miscegenation. He goes on to suggest that “the sex factor” is the root—and, this book also argues, the route—that must be explored and excavated in order to uncover the complex understanding and function of polarized racial boundaries and conflict. By reconfiguring the trope of miscegenation as a rehearsal of the complex intersection of race, nation, gender, sexuality, and class, it is possible to critical opportunities to traverse new territories rather than merely transgress binarized boundaries.