SOURCE: "Committed to the Conduit," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4721, September 24, 1993, p. 27.

In the following review of St. Peter Relates an Incident, Eley summarizes Johnson's career and the significance of his poetry.

James Weldon Johnson's reputation no longer rests—if it ever truly did—on his poems. Although his work includes the gospel hymn, "Steal Away to Jesus," he arguably deserves most respect as an exemplary member of W.E.B. Du Bois's "talented tenth": black Americans who, having managed to surmount the difficulties encountered by the descendants of slaves and having joined the middle class, neither abandon their brothers nor burn out.

Johnson was born in 1871, in Florida, the son of a waiter and a schoolmistress, and church was an influential part of his upbringing. Extraordinarily energetic and highly disciplined, by the age of twenty-three he had become principal of a segregated school and, a year later...