James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American civil rights activist
and writer. He led the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and was the first African-American professor at New York
University. As a writer, Johnson was well-known in the Harlem
Renaissance for his novels and poems which dealt primarily with black
culture. In "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", Johnson offers a
fictional account of a biracial man living in America in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who attempts to pass as a white
man to ensure his safety and future prospects. Read & Co. Classics is
republishing this classic novel now in a new addition complete with the
poem "At the Closed Gate of Justice" by James D. Corrothers.