He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson.

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

[1] Johnson and his brother Rosamond moved to New York City as young men, joining the Great Migration out of the South in the first half of the 20th century.

Over the next 40 years, Johnson served in several public capacities, working in education, the diplomatic corps, and civil rights activism.

In 1910, Johnson married Grace Nail, whom he had met in New York City several years earlier while he was working as a songwriter.

[7] After their return to New York from Nicaragua, Johnson became increasingly involved in the Harlem Renaissance, a great flourishing of art and writing.

[8] Johnson became involved in civil rights activism, especially the campaign to pass the federal Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, as Southern states did not prosecute perpetrators.

[11] His 1920 report about "the economic corruption, forced labor, press censorship, racial segregation and wanton violence introduced to Haiti by the U.S. occupation encouraged numerous African Americans to flood the State Department and the offices of Republican Party officials with letters" calling for an end to the abuses and to remove troops.

Appointed in 1920 as the first executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson helped increase membership and extended the movement's reach by organizing numerous new chapters in the South.

In 1916, Johnson started working as a field secretary and organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1910.

Opposing race riots in Northern cities and the lynchings frequent in the South during and immediately after the end of World War I, Johnson engaged the NAACP in mass demonstrations.

In 1919, Johnson coined the term "Red Summer" and organized peaceful protests against the white racial violence against blacks that broke out that year in numerous industrial cities of the North and Midwest.

[14][15] Johnson traveled to Haiti to investigate conditions on the island, which had been occupied by U.S. Marines since 1915, ostensibly because of political unrest.

He lobbied for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1921, which was passed easily by the House, but repeatedly defeated by the white Southern bloc in the Senate.

Shortly before his death in 1938, Johnson supported efforts by Ignatz Waghalter, a Polish-Jewish composer who had escaped the Nazis of Germany, to establish a classical orchestra of African-American musicians.

In the summer of 1891, following his freshman year at Atlanta University, Johnson went to a rural district in Georgia to teach the descendants of former slaves.

"In all of my experience there has been no period so brief that has meant so much in my education for life as the three months I spent in the backwoods of Georgia," Johnson wrote.

In addition to discussing literature, he lectured on a wide range of issues related to the lives and civil rights of black Americans.

They collaborated on such hits as "Tell Me, Dusky Maiden", "Nobody's Looking but the Owl and the Moon", and the spiritual "Dem Bones", for which Johnson wrote the lyrics and his brother the music.

[18]"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" had influenced other artistic works, inspiring art such as Gwendolyn Ann Magee's quilted mosaics.

Johnson also collaborated on the opera Tolosa with his brother, who wrote the music; it satirized the U.S. annexation of the Pacific islands.

He wrote substantial portions of his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and his poetry collection, Fifty Years, during this period.

[22] Johnson's first success as a writer was the poem "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (1899), which his brother Rosamond later set to music; the song became unofficially known as the "Negro National Anthem".

During his time in the diplomatic service, Johnson completed what became his best-known book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912.

He had a broad appreciation for black artists, musicians and writers, and worked to heighten awareness in the wider society of their creativity.

In 1922, he published a landmark anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, with a "Preface" that celebrated the power of black expressive culture.

Johnson assisted playwright Annie Nathan Meyer in crafting the Broadway play Black Souls (1924) by editing the work for authenticity of language.

It also included a dancing and band sequence, depicting a fun-looking, middle-class oriented club with drinks and gambling, as its opening backdrop.