J. Rosamond Johnson

His maternal great-grandmother, Hester Argo, had escaped from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) during the revolutionary upheaval in 1802, along with her three young children, including Johnson's grandfather, Stephen Dillet (1797–1880.

Traveling to New York, he began his show business career along with his older brother James Weldon Johnson and composer Bob Cole.

The men also produced two successful Broadway operettas with casts of black actors: Shoo-Fly Regiment of 1906 and The Red Moon of 1908.

He played a Tuskegee soldier who enlists in the Spanish–American War in The Shoo Fly Regiment and portrayed African-American Plunk Green opposite Abbie Mitchell's Minnehaha, a mixed Indian/black woman, in The Red Moon.

[12] In The Red Moon, Cole and Johnson broke racial lines as they included a love scene between Rosamond's Green and Mitchell's Minnehaha.

This spotlight on Native Americans was so well received that Rosamond was inducted as a 'sub-chief' into the Iroquois tribe of Montreal's Caughnawaga Reservation, which had a majority population of ethnic Mohawk people.

[13] Cole and the Johnson brothers also created and produced several "white" musicals: Sleeping Beauty and the Beast in 1901, In Newport in 1904, and Humpty Dumpty in 1904.

[14] Johnson created vocal arrangements for the 1933 film version of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones starring Paul Robeson.

[15] Their adopted son, Donald McQuivey Johnson, a 20-year-old Bard College student, fatally shot himself in his dorm room five months after his father's death.