The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
1912
What happens to a man who can choose which America he belongs to? The narrator of this radical novel knows from childhood that his light skin sets him apart from the Black world his mother inhabits, yet the white world will never fully accept him. He moves through a Black college in the South, the vibrant nightlife of New York where he becomes obsessed with ragtime, and finally into the comfortable suburbs of whiteness. A single night of witnessing brutal violence, a lynching, sends him fleeing into a life of passing, trading his musical gifts for safety and material comfort. Johnson wrote this as a quiet explosion: anonymous at first, disguised as a real memoir, designed to show white America exactly what their color lines cost. The novel's power lies in its refusal to offer easy answers. Here is a man who chose survival over art, whiteness over Blackness, and the novel asks: what did that choice destroy? The "ex-colored man" becomes both a confession and an accusation, a document of the high price America extracts from those who dare to stand between its color lines.
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“New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“...but if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or country.””
— James Weldon Johnson
“Paris practices its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practices both very seriously.””
— James Weldon Johnson
