American poet, novelist and essayist James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, FL, into a musically inclined family (his brother was noted composer and songwriter J. Rosamond Johnson) and received his B.A. from Atlanta University and his M.A. from that institution two years later, a significant accomplishment in an era when many blacks were prevented from getting any higher education at all.

He was hired as a teacher and the principal at an all-black school in Jacksonville. At the same time, he was studying law and in 1897 he received his law degree and was admitted to the Florida bar, the first black attorney to do so since the end of the Civil War. In 1901 he relocated to New York City, where he joined his brother Rosamond and his partner in writing songs for both the stage and light opera, and the team was quite successful. One song was so popular that they cleared $13,000 from it--an astonishing sum at the time--and used that money to travel to France, where they spent several months partying and traveling before returning to the US.

He was soon appointed as the American Consul in Venezuela, and his tenure there was so productive he was appointed to the same position in Nicaragua, again with great success. In 1910 he married Grace Nail, and two years later produced his first novel, the (fictional) "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (the subject was so sensitive at the time that the book was published with no writer's credit; it wasn't until 1927 that he was acknowledged as the author). He continued writing essays, books and songs and wrote the English libretto for the opera "Goyescas", which was presented at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1915. In addition, he served for many years as secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He returned to teaching in 1930--while still continuing his writing--and became Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University. In 1934 he was named Visiting Professor of Literature at New York University.

On June 26, 1938, Johnson's wife was driving both of them in a blinding rain through a railroad crossing near their summer home in Bar Harbor, ME, when the car was struck by a train. His wife was seriously injured with a skull fracture and leg lacerations but survived. Johnson was killed instantly.