James Weldon Johnson’s Ode to the “Deep River” of American History

Marches and mobs in Washington, D.C., have been much on the minds of Americans of late. So, too, for James Weldon Johnson in 1930, when the longtime secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People crafted the poem “St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day.” First published that year in a private printing of only 200 copies and then in 1935 to a larger audience, Johnson’s remarkable six-page creation warrants our reading now as the FBI pursues hundreds of insurrectionists from the Capitol riot on January 6. Johnson’s poem also provides a bracing historical grounding as Congress prepares a commission to investigate how former President Donald Trump and many other elements of government and society conspired to create the mob that threatened the life of our democracy.

Johnson drew upon a lifetime of political and literary work to arrive at his inspiration for the poem. Born in 1871, he was a native of Jacksonville, Florida, well educated in primary and secondary schools before attending Atlanta University in the early 1890s. By World War I, Johnson had established himself as one of the great African American polymaths in our history. He was a musical lyricist on early Broadway; with his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, he composed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem. He was a diplomat in the U.S. foreign service in Latin America, a brilliant novelist and poet, a superb newspaper essayist, a primary literary broker of what we have come to call the Harlem Renaissance, and the organizational force behind the NAACP.

Johnson knew deeply the humiliation and social destruction—as well as the community resilience—forced by the Jim Crow system. In 1919 and 1920, he was the NAACP’s lead activist and lobbyist for an anti-lynching bill before Congress. The final failure of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in the Senate in 1922, after passing in the House, was not for lack of heroic effort by Johnson and his team. The American obscenity of lynching infested Johnson’s artistic and moral imagination, fostering a kind of radical patriotism inspired by the promise of emancipation.

His poem “Fifty Years,” published on page one of The New York Times on January 1, 1913, commemorated a half-century of Black freedom and remains one of the most compelling statements of African American birthright ever imagined:

For never let the thought arise
That we are here on sufferance bare;
Outcasts, asylumed ’neath these skies,
And aliens without part or share.

This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.

Johnson was further a major organizer of the Silent Protest March against lynching, sponsored by the NAACP, in 1917, which filled Fifth Avenue in New York with 10,000 disciplined, peaceful Black people in an event unlike anyone had ever seen.