The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Vol. 1, The New York Age Editorials (1914-1923).

Fleming, Robert E.

James Weldon Johnson. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Volume I: The New York Age Editorials (1914-1923). Ed. with an Intro. by Sandra Kathryn Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 324 pp. $45.00.

--. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Volume II: Social, Political, and Literary Essays. Ed. with an Intro. by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. New York: Oxford UP. 1995. 473 pp. $49.96.

James Weldon Johnson's writings dominated the 1920s as did those of no other African American writer with the possible exception of W. E. B. Du Bois. As leader of the NAACP, former State Department envoy to foreign lands, novelist, and poet, Johnson was a touchstone to the thinking of literary Black America during the decade of the Harlem Renaissance. Sondra Kathryn Wilson's two-volume edition The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson documents Johnson's rise to that position and shows what Johnson wrote once he had achieved his prominent position. The collection makes available texts that were previously difficult to access and includes Johnson's most familiar work, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

In 1914, when Johnson returned from his diplomatic posts as consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and Corinto, Nicaragua, he needed both a full-time job to support himself and his wife, Grace Nail Johnson, and a power base from which to launch a further literary and political career. (His reputation in New York at this point was most closely tied to his successes as a writer of musical comedy.) He found the power base, if not exactly the full-time job, as a contributing editor of the New York Age, for which he wrote editorials from October 1914 through July 1923.

Volume I of The Selected Writings collects 196 columns from those years, divided by the editor into three broad categories--social, political, and literary editorials--and subdivided into more specific topics within these categories. Coverage within each category is sufficient to give the reader an excellent idea of the span of Johnson's views on the topic.

The range of Johnson's interests will surprise some who think of him only as a crusader for racial justice within the United States and as a man of letters. Under Social Editorials, one finds the expected attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, but also reads supportive columns on suffrage for women and equal economic treatment of women workers, of the role of the Black church in promoting social equality, and of the need to support Black publications.

As a political commentator, Johnson ranges widely, from a denunciation of President Wilson's stand on racial questions to more far-flung national and international issues. The problems of African America competed with concerns about capital punishment, Britain's treatment of Ireland, the U.S. invasion of Haiti, and Gandhi's drive for Indian independence.

Literary editorials range from standard articles on the greatness of Shakespeare (written to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of his death) to groundbreaking essays that helped to usher in the Harlem Renaissance: "Resurgence of the Negro in Literature" (22 Apr. 1922), "A Real Poet" (20 May 1922) on Claude McKay, and "Negro Theatrical Invasion of Europe" (19 May 1923).

Wilson does a competent job in introducing each section, although she sometimes ignores subtexts that might add to the reader's understanding of a given editorial. For example, Johnson attacks Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 editorials. It would in no way have undercut Johnson's obvious sincerity to point out in the introduction to this section that Johnson had resigned from his diplomatic position because the election of Wilson boded ill for the advancement of a Black Republican consul.

Volume I, then, fills a real need for making a large body of Johnson's writings readily accessible. The second volume, bearing the somewhat misleading subtitle Social, Political, and Literary Essays, is less unified and raises some questions about the editor's judgment and editorial practices. This volume contains a number of previously uncollected essays and speeches, and even some speeches that apparently appear here for the first time. (Because of the lack of standard editorial apparatus in the edition, it is impossible to know for certain.) But it also contains large samples of Johnson's literary work. For example, both the 1912 text of Johnson s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and his Fifty Years & Other Poems (1917) are reprinted in their entirety, even though the former is readily available in a Penguin Classics edition and its 1927 edition is reprinted by several publishers. The ninety pages devoted to it here could better have been employed to reprint more inaccessible texts. On the other hand, Fifty Years is hard to come by, never having been reprinted in recent times, and readers will be grateful for the printing of two papers Johnson presented while a student at Atlanta University and for the reproduction of six poems from his college years.

The first two-thirds of Volume II, as the subtitle states, contain speeches and essays dating from 1915 through 1937. These speeches were delivered at a wide variety of conferences and convocations and range from racial relations to international affairs. Most of the articles appeared in Crisis, while a few first appeared in mainstream publications. The entire text of Negro Americans: What Now?, a book that is difficult to locate, is reprinted, a very appropriate choice.

Considering that this collection bears the imprint of Oxford University Press and that it is likely to become a standard reference work, someone should go over the next printing and eliminate several typographical errors. Perhaps Wilson scrupulously recorded the text before her, reproducing all accidentals. (In the absence of textual apparatus it is impossible to tell.) But Johnson was a perfectionist, and it is hard to imagine his allowing some of the errors reproduced in this edition to appear under his name.

The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson fills in many of the blanks in James Weldon Johnson's literary career that could previously be investigated only by those who had access to the Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Library, and in this way it performs a needed service for Johnson scholars everywhere.