James Weldon Johnson > Quotes

“Lift every voice and sing.”
― James Weldon Johnson

“New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely - I'll make me a world.”
― James Weldon Johnson, I'll Make A World: James Weldon Johnson's Story of The Creation

“Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“...but if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“Paris practices its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practices both very seriously.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“Listen!--- Listen!
All you sons of Pharaoh.
Who do you think can hold God's people
when the Lord God himself has said,
Let my people go?”
― James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

“The Awakening

I dreamed that I was a rose
That grew beside a lonely way,
Close by a path none ever chose,
And there I lingered day by day.
Beneath the sunshine and the show’r
I grew and waited there apart,
Gathering perfume hour by hour,
And storing it within my heart,
Yet, never knew,
Just why I waited there and grew.

I dreamed that you were a bee
That one day gaily flew along,
You came across the hedge to me,
And sang a soft, love-burdened song.
You brushed my petals with a kiss,
I woke to gladness with a start,
And yielded up to you in bliss
The treasured fragrance of my heart;
And then I knew
That I had waited there for you.”
― James Weldon Johnson, Complete Poems

“Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or country.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.”
― James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems

“I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“It may be because Southerners are very much like Frenchmen in that they must talk; and not only must they talk, but they must express their opinions.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself—where I learned to speak merely by speaking. This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching. I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time. A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“I felt leap within me pride that I was colored; and I began to form wild dreams of bringing glory and honor to the Negro race.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of this one funnel.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States?”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?”
― James Weldon Johnson

“It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“I know the South claims that it has spent millions for the education of the blacks, and that it has of its own free will shouldered this awful burden. It seems to be forgetful of the fact that these millions have been taken from the public tax funds for education, and that the law of political economy which recognizes the land owner as the one who really pays the taxes is not tenable. It would be just as reasonable for the relatively few land owners of Manhattan to complain that they had to stand the financial burden of the education of the thousands and thousands of children whose parents pay rent for tenements and flats. Let the millions of producing and consuming Negroes be taken out of the South, and it would be quickly seen how much less of public funds there would be to appropriate for education or any other purpose.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“It is the spirit of the South to defend everything belonging to it. The North is too cosmopolitan and tolerant for such a spirit.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“The battle was first waged over the right of the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul; later, as to whether he had sufficient intellect to master even the rudiments of learning; and today it is being fought out over his social recognition.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“Young man, your arm's too short to box with God!”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

“I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“New York had impressed me as a place where there was lots of money and not much difficulty in getting it.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man