James Weldon Johnson: Jacksonville’s Poet Who Gave a Nation Its Anthem

On a February morning in 1900, 500 Black schoolchildren in Jacksonville stood and recited a poem their principal had written for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The words stuck. Within a decade, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” had traveled to churches, schools, and meeting halls across the country. The NAACP would later adopt it as the Black National Anthem. The principal who wrote it was 28 years old.

LaVilla’s Favorite Son

James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 in LaVilla, a predominantly Black neighborhood just west of downtown Jacksonville. His mother, Helen Louise Dillet, was a musician from the Bahamas who taught at the Edwin M. Stanton School. His father was a headwaiter at the St. James Hotel. Johnson attended Stanton himself, then left for Atlanta University. When he returned in 1894, he came back to the same school, this time as its principal.

He didn’t just teach. He expanded Stanton from an elementary school into the first public high school for African Americans in Florida, adding courses in algebra, literature, physics, and Spanish. In 1895, he founded the Daily American, Florida’s first Black-owned daily newspaper. Two years later, he became the first African American admitted to the Florida Bar through open examination since Reconstruction.

From Jacksonville to the World Stage

Johnson’s ambitions outgrew Jacksonville. He and his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, moved to New York and wrote over 200 songs for Broadway. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Venezuela, then Nicaragua. He later led the NAACP as its executive secretary from 1920 to 1930, guiding the organization through some of its most consequential years.

He was also a novelist. His 1912 book The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man explored racial passing with a complexity that still resonates.

Finding Johnson in Jacksonville

Jacksonville has slowly reclaimed its native son. In 2020, the city renamed its downtown park from Hemming Park to James Weldon Johnson Park. The site of his childhood home at 120 Lee Street is now Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park. And Stanton College Preparatory School, a few miles from the original campus, carries his school’s name as one of the top-ranked high schools in Florida.