James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American writer, diplomat, musician, public intellectual, and civil rights leader. The first African American executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, he was known for his poetry, novels, anthologies, and editorial writings. From 1906 to 1913 he served as President Theodore Roosevelt's U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1931 he was appointed the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and in 1934 he became New York University's first African American professor.
