Johnson, James Weldon

Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition [1901] (New York Penguin, 1993), pp. 90, 289-290 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912] (New York Penguin, 1990), pp. Ill, 113, 116 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London Verso, 1997), pp. 195-199. 

For African-American writers seeking in the 1920s to affirm the lives and culture of rural and poor black Americans, the Irish Literary Renaissance served as an inspiration for what has now became known as the Harlem Renaissance. In the Prefaces to his 1922 and 1931 anthologies. The Book of American Negro Poetry, the poet and academic James Weldon Johnson cited the example of Synge with particular reference to the creation of a language which moved away from the limitations and connotations of the kind of minstrel dialect which had in the past been used to represent African-American speech, a dialect which in his view had only two main stops, humor and pathos ... 

James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York Harcourt, Brace c World, 1931), pp. 41-2. 

James Weldon Johnson, God s Trombones Seven Negro Sermons in Yerse (New York Viking Press, 1969). 

---