SOURCE: "James Weldon Johnson," in Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness, The 1920's: Three Harlem Renaissance Authors, Libra Publishers, 1964, pp. 18-46.

In the following excerpt, Bronz examines the social importance of Johnson 's early poetry in Fifty Years, and Other Poems and comments on his later work as a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance.

His First Poems: History, Polemics, and Croons

[Johnson's] first poem to reach a large audience, "Lift Every Voice," has become known as the Negro National Anthem.¹⁴ Johnson wrote the anthem together with [his brother John] Rosamond in 1900, to be sung by Jacksonville school children on Lincoln's Birthday. The following snippets give a fair summary:

 Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;

…..

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, … 

 Till we stand at last where the white gleam of our star is...