Johnson took to heart the call to serve his community, as he demonstrated through a long and varied career in public life. Johnson attended Atlanta University, created to provide African Americans an education based on the classics and on the idea of public service.

As a teenager, Johnson worked as a secretary to a white physician who took him to New York City and Washington, D.C., tutored him in upper-class manners, gave him books to read, and encouraged him to write. They saw to it that their children received a good education and lived a secure middle-class life-relatively unusual for African Americans during the nineteenth century. His father was headwaiter at an expensive restaurant, and his mother was an elementary school teacher and a gifted pianist neither had been slaves. James William Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 17, 1871. This time, the book was widely sold and discussed, and it has remained in print ever since. His book was re-issued by Knopf, an influential firm that published many of the Harlem Renaissance writers, and for the first time Johnson acknowledged that he was the author. With the blooming of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Johnson became widely known as a writer and an intellectual. Its publisher went out of business, and the book all but disappeared. When the book was published, only two or three books by African Americans had attracted large audiences, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man did not sell many copies. The story includes many short scenes and didactic digressions, told in a rather flat style with little description or dialogue. In the end, he decides to “pass,” or to live as a white man, and abandon his African American heritage. The narrator travels around the United States and through Europe, observing how white and black people behave within separate enclaves and with each other. The novel, told in the first person, is the story of a man whose parents were a wealthy white Southern gentleman and the “coloured” seamstress employed by the gentleman’s family. The work is a novel, but the author hoped that by remaining anonymous he could persuade readers that it was an actual autobiography.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson, was published anonymously by a small New York publisher, Sherman, French and Company, in 1912.

The biography of an ex colored man