Poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp. She was raised in Rome, Georgia, by parents of Black, Native American, and English descent. She graduated from Atlanta University Normal College in 1896, after which she taught school in Marietta, Georgia, and served as an assistant principal at a school in Atlanta. A gifted violinist, she left this role to study music at Oberlin Conservatory in 1902. The following year, she married Henry Lincoln Johnson, a lawyer, government employee, and well-known Republican party member. She published her first poem in The Voice of the Negro in 1905.
Johnson and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., in 1910, where they would live for the rest of their lives. She found opportunities to write poetry, plays, songs, and stories despite her husband’s preference that she focus on taking care of their home and their eventual two sons. Johnson was widowed in 1925, after which she worked as a substitute teacher and a file clerk to support her sons. President Coolidge later appointed her to a position with the Department of Labor in recognition of her late husband’s political work.
Her poetry collections, most notably The Heart of a Woman, Bronze, and An Autumn Love Cycle, explored the female psyche in the mode of Sara Teasdale, but ventured as well into the less-documented territory of life as a woman of color in a pre–Civil Rights United States. She also wrote 28 plays, although only two were published in her lifetime, likely because of their controversial racial justice themes and direct criticism on topics like lynching. Blue Blood was performed by the Krigwa Players in New York City in 1926, while Plumes won first place in a contest run by the prominent Harlem Renaissance magazine Opportunity. She also wrote a weekly column in The Crisis for seven years. Many of her unpublished plays, as well as a novel and short stories, have been lost.
In the 1920s and 30s, Johnson opened her Washington, D.C., home, to other black writers, including Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. This “S Street Salon” and the exchange of ideas it promoted was significant in broadening the New York–focused Harlem Renaissance into a wider national movement. Johnson’s generous mentorship and support of younger poets, sometimes extending to offering struggling poets a home with her and her family, made her a pivotal figure in the history of Black American literature. She died in 1966.
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More Georgia Douglas Johnson
Text: Read poems by Johnson at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Watch Kassidi Jones' presentation on Johnson for the Beineke Library