The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man - Johnson, James Weldon
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The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man explores the intricacies of racial identity through the eventful life of its mixed-race narrator. James Weldon Johnson tells his story where his mulatto mother, aided by monthly checks from his white father, is able to provide a secure and cultured environment. Learning of his black heritage by accident he experiences the first of several identity shifts that eventually finds him opting for membership in white society. Johnson's theme of moral cowardice sets his tragic story of color lines at the turn of the century--from a black college in Jacksonville…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man explores the intricacies of racial identity through the eventful life of its mixed-race narrator. James Weldon Johnson tells his story where his mulatto mother, aided by monthly checks from his white father, is able to provide a secure and cultured environment. Learning of his black heritage by accident he experiences the first of several identity shifts that eventually finds him opting for membership in white society. Johnson's theme of moral cowardice sets his tragic story of color lines at the turn of the century--from a black college in Jacksonville to an elite New York nightclub, the rural South to the white suburbs of the Northeast. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a powerful, unsentimental examination of race in America. "This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day."
Autorenporträt
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was an American author and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson rose to become one of the most successful officials in the organization. He traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, for example, to investigate a brutal lynching that was witnessed by thousands. His report on the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the burning-to-death of Ell Persons was published nationally as a supplement to the July 1917 issue of the NAACP's Crisis magazine, and during his visit there he chartered the Memphis chapter of the NAACP. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He was appointed under President Theodore Roosevelt as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua for most of the period from 1906 to 1913. In 1934 he was the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically black university. Johnson died in 1938 while vacationing in Wiscasset, Maine, when the car his wife was driving was hit by a train. His funeral in Harlem was attended by more than 2000 people. Johnson's ashes are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.