Fifty Years and Other Poems

Fifty Years and Other Poems is the first poetry collection by James Weldon Johnson, published in 1917. Johnson, who lived from 1871 to 1938, was one of the central figures of early twentieth century African American literary and political life. He served as field secretary and later as executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote the lyrics to Lift Every Voice and Sing, and produced substantial work in poetry, fiction, and political writing across his long career.

The title poem Fifty Years was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1913 and first appeared in the New York Times on January 1, 1913. The poem looks back across the fifty years since emancipation and reflects on what African Americans had accomplished, what they had endured, and what remained to be done in the substantial work of building a free African American community in the post Civil War United States. The poem became one of the central documents of African American literature in the early twentieth century and is now widely anthologised.

The other poems in the collection include various of the lyric and occasional poems that Johnson had been producing across the previous two decades. He wrote in the standard formal English verse traditions of the period but increasingly engaged with African American dialect and with the substantial African American oral and musical traditions that would become more central in his later work. The collection prepared the ground for his later masterwork God’s Trombones of 1927, the substantial sequence of poems based on the African American folk sermon tradition that established his lasting reputation as a poet.

Johnson’s broader career was substantial. He served as American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua during the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft administrations, wrote the early African American novel The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man published anonymously in 1912, and produced substantial work as editor of anthologies including The Book of American Negro Poetry of 1922 that helped establish the African American literary canon. His leadership at the NAACP during the 1920s was substantial in the broader civil rights movement of the period.

The collection runs about a hundred and fifty pages and is essential reading for anyone interested in early twentieth century African American literature. It pairs naturally with God’s Trombones and with the broader Harlem Renaissance poetry tradition.