LEST WE FORGET GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
(September 10, 1880- May 14, 1966)

The first black female poet of the twentieth century!

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she was educated in the public schools of the city and completed the "normal course" at Atlanta University before studying music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.

In 1903 she married Henry Lincoln Johnson who later became a prominent lawyer and politician. President William Howard Taft appointed her husband to the post of recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia and the Johnsons moved to Washington, D.C. in 1909.
Before her husband's death in 1925, the Johnsons were active pioneers in the social, political, and literary life of Washington. Georgia was a participant and leader in most of the organizations in the Washington area committed to concerns of women and minorities, and occasionaly she accepted speaking engagements on these topics. She was a member of the Civic Club, The League of Neighbors of New York, and the Crisis Guild for Writers and Artists.

By 1928 her books included three volumes of poetry, The Heart of A Woman and Other Poems(1918)
Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928).
       Inspired by her mentor William Stanley Braithwaite, she became one of the "Genteel School" of writers, whose lyric poems are often compared with those of Sara Teasdale. She set many of her poems to music and enjoyed singing and playing them on the piano for friends who visited her home.  The poems in her first volume were said to "transcend the bonds of race."  Four years later, when Bronze appeared, she had begun to feel the spirit of the "New Negro Renaissance"; and the point of view from which she wrote became "the heart of a colored woman aware of her social problems."

She had been influenced by friends to try her hand at writing drama and had found it a "living avenue" but she did not mean to imply that she could make a living by writing plays.

Whatever else the New Negro Renaissance may have done for blacks, it did very little to improve the black playwright's chance to get a play produced on the commercial American stage of the 1920s and 1930s.  Her first known attempt at playwriting was motivated by the anti-lynching campaign following the First World War.  Sunday Morning in the South (1924), her best known play, is set in the early twenties and depicts the death of a young black man who is wrongly accused of raping a white woman and is lynched by an angry mob before his grandmother can prove his innocence.

Protest themes about rape and lynching, along with the social status of black women and of their mulatto sons, dominates all of her dramatic writing.  Her next drama, Blue Blood, was produced by the
W.E.B. Du Bois Krigwa (an acronym for Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists) Players in New York, Washington, and elsewhere between 1926 and 1928. May Miller Sullivan and Frank Horne (Lena's uncle) performed in the New York production, which treats the shocking discovery by a mulatto couple about to get married that they have the same white father. The play was selected by Frank Shay for publication in Fifty More Contemporary One-Act Plays (1928).

            Plumes, her third play, won the Opportunity First Place Award in 1927--a sum of $60.00 and publication by Samuel French Publishers.   Her ability to write folk drama is best displayed in this short play about the conflict of a poor southern mother who must decide whether to spend her life savings of $50.00 on an operation that may not save her daughter's life or to use that money to bury her in styles complete with plumes on the heads of the horses drawing the hearse.

Although her popularity peaked in the 1920s, over the next few decades she wrote many songs, short stories, a biography of her late husband and several other works which were salvaged from her house after her death.

In the eyes of some critics, her unceasing sponsorship of Washington, D.C.'s black cultural and intellectual circle during the 1920s and 1930s was of parallel importance to her own artistic input.  She invited such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois and
Zora Neale Hurston for a weekly forum of cultural discussions. Her "S Street Salon" was both "a freewheeling jumble of the gifted, famous and odd" in D.C. and a "safe and supportive atmosphere where 'Harlem Renaissance' writers struggled with their literary work and where that work found its audience".



                                                                       
In 1965 Atlanta University presented Georgia with a doctorate of literature, praising her as a
"sensitive singer of sad songs, faithful interpreter of the feminine heart of a Negro with its joys, sorrows, limitations and frustrations of racial oppression in a male-dominated world; dreamer of broken dreams who translated her disappointments into such memorable and immortal lines as:
        'The heart of a woman falls back with the night/
         and enters some alien cage of its plight,/
         and tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars/
         while it breaks, breaks, breaks, on the sheltering
         bars.'

She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009.

COMMON DUST

by Georgia Johnson Douglas

And who shall separate the dust

What later we shall be:

Whose keen discerning eye will scan

And solve the mystery?

The high, the low, the rich, the poor,

                                                 The black, the white, the red,

                                                 And all the chromatic between,

                                                 Of whom shall it be said:

                                                 Here lies the dust of Africa;

                                                 Here are the sons of Rome;

                                                 Here lies the one unlabeled,

                                                 The world at large his home!

                                                 Can one then separate the dust?

                                                 Will mankind lie apart,

                                                 When life has settled back again

                                                 The same as from the start?

Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989     Winona L. Fletcher

Wikipedia     www.georgiawritershalloffame.org

http://allpoetry.com/Georgia-Douglas-Johnson