Given that there’s no full biography for Fenton Johnson, and that it would be difficult to produce one with reliable levels of detail at this late date, this post is going to resort to a measure of speculation. Reader beware: I’m not a fully engaged scholar, and my knowledge of American and Afro-American history for the early 20^th century is only a little better than average. Still, I want to write this post during Black History Month to give a fuller picture of this interesting, if lesser-known, literary figure incorporating some additional information that has become available to me.

From my earliest encounters with Johnson’s work last decade, I’d read that he founded two magazines around 1920 that seemed to be concerned with political issues. What was he writing there? What were his political alliances, his political and social opinions? The possible range of positions here are wide — the early 20^th century was a dynamic period, including one of the periodic “backlash” swings in American commitment to racial equality, while it was also an era where the “make it new” artistic movements included many in the arts who explicitly aligned themselves with radical political change. Just as to be a Modernist poet likely led them to make common cause with other Modernists in drama, painting, music, sculpture, etc, — the Modernists were often drawn to new, radical, political movements. A whole spectrum of such alignments were on offer: everything from revolutionary Communism spurred by the recent Soviet Russian Revolution, to Catholic Worker or Democratic Socialism, to anarchism, to various kinds of American Lost (Confederate) Cause racism, to the new violent reactionary nationalist cadres that came to be known as Fascism.

No matter what your personal political convictions are, looking into the alignments of Modernists in the first half of the 20^th century is land-mine territory if you believe that the poets you read must have steadfastly maintained recognizably similar political beliefs to your own. Some of them even traced apostate paths making them bipolar pariahs!

For a moment let’s revisit Fenton Johnson’s most famous poem, “Tired.”

A little-appreciated aspect of Johnson’s most famous poem: it’s written in a persona. The speaker is clearly not Johnson himself.

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Published in an avant-garde poetry magazine in 1919, it could have been written 50 years later, and it would have fit right in. Dashikis, big Afros, raised left fists, and conga drums would sit well in between this poem’s lines — and frankly, lines like “I’m tired of building up somebody else’s civilization” still sound a radical critique today. In Johnson’s biographic summary for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame it’s said that Others  editor/founder Kreymborg called Johnson “The first radical poet.” James Weldon Johnson* wrote slightly more specifically that Fenton Johnson was “One of the first Negro revolutionary poets” when he expanded his opinion of him in a revised 1931 edition of his landmark The Book of American Negro Poetry.

Oh, I thought, if I could only read Fenton Johnson in his short-lived The Favorite Magazine  which was said to have included essays on his political and social opinions circa 1919 when he’s also publishing his revolutionary poetry in Others!  I’m not sure how many issues there were of this magazine (it may have been a few as two), but as far as online materials there’s only a handful of lo-res scans showing clippings (not even entire pages) of The Favorite Magazine  that I’ve found. What I did find was a good PDF scan of Johnson’s book For the Highest Good,  from 1920 which seems to be his attempt to save and further distribute selections from that magazine.

Whatever my expectations might have been, the result was disappointing. The titular essay is the most informative. It’s a summary of his expressed credo that “Co-Operation Will Solve the Race Problem.” The rest of this very short book reads like hack-journalism in an obsequious mode. Politically it’s closely aligned with the Republican party.**  Three essays in the short book are spent extolling the party, an obscure Republican politician/journalist, and the then current Republican mayor of Chicago, the famously corrupt William Hale Thompson.*** Johnson is adamant at declaiming his firm opposition to “Bolshevism.” His economic and labor platform seems to be (like his platform for racial and civil rights problems) mutual cooperation as well. Labor and Business need to work together he urges. One of the hard-to-read lo-res scanned clippings from the actual magazine praises Madame C. J. Walker for advancing the Afro-American cause through her business success.

If one was looking for an unsparing prose analysis that would seem to match the underlayment of his poetry, this isn’t that. If in his poetry he might aim to be, might be seen as, a Superman — as a Clark Kent he’s not only mild-mannered, he’s not even much of a reporter. I’m somewhat familiar with Republican party positions in this era, and this reads to me to be a restatement of their positions and political platform, with Johnson extending its labor/capital stance to the long-suffering crisis of Black second-class citizenship. The scanned copy that produced the PDF I read captures this piece of marginalia: an author’s dated, handwritten note to the new U. S. Vice President Calvin Coolidge dated Nov. 15, 1920. A stamp a couple of pages in, shows that if this was presented and was to be conveyed in some way to Coolidge, it was passed off to the Harvard University Library on November 27^th, only a few days later. I was disappointed at the lack of substance in the book’s contents, but still a little sad to read that once again Johnson’s estimate of his salience was passed off.

Johnson’s handwritten note on the flyleaf of “For the Highest Good.”

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My speculation, my judgement so far with gaps known and unknown: in his poetry Johnson remains the revolutionary he was made out to be. And I am not sure that his public political face represented his thoughts and emotions in totality. Was all this (to simply paraphrase) “I’m here to put my Black shoulder to the wheel to move forward mainstream (Republican) politics” persona just a way to get over, to cross-over, to get him a larger platform (or at least pay the rent?) Or where the more radical critiques portrayed in his poems “man on the street” personas — not representative of Johnson’s own sincere beliefs, but rather warnings of why a more moderate approach must actually produce change?

And there’s another possibility to speculate on: by the middle of the 1920s Johnson’s literary work seems to have gone dark. While there was another, 1920s, poetry collection planned by Johnson that likely extended the work that was printed in Others, it apparently found no publisher, and as of yet I know of no other writings that might show Johnson’s political analysis evolving or uncloaking. The 1930s produced another wave of political consciousness for writers. During that decade he apparently was employed with the New Deal WPA Writer’s project, but this could have been just a way to find a survival income during the Great Depression. Johnson lived past WWII and into the dawn of yet another wave of activism for Afro-American full citizenship. Some of the people who associated with him in the Chicago scene from the Thirties onward, and who were aware of his poetry, had less-accommodationist stances. I’ll plan to talk a little bit about them next time.

Instead of another selection from Fenton Johnson’s poetry, I’ll offer this work of another Afro-American 20^th century poet today, one James Marshall Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix gets all his proper respect as a revolutionary of guitar, but way less than he deserves as a songwriter. In his “Up from the Skies”  he gives us an Afro-Futurist (or is it Afro-Historicist) monolog about facing a world he’s both a foundational part of and estranged from.****  The LYL Band can’t hope to duplicate Hendrix’s performance, but with this variation we performed last fall on the anniversary of Hendrix’s passing-on, I tried to bring forward the SF story his lyric tells — a story that, as famous as Hendrix genius-electric-guitarist was, was maybe as under-read as Fenton Johnson.

 

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*James Weldon Johnson was a polymath who among other things was a leading Black civil rights activist of his time, a literary figure himself, and an anthologist who helped make sure Fenton Johnson’s name was recorded as an Afro-American poet of note. Despite the shared last name, they are not related. As far as I know, neither JWJ nor Kreymborg ever met Fenton Johnson much less discussed politics or his poetic aesthetics with him.

I’ll mention here that there is a contemporary author also named Fenton Johnson. I reached out to him yesterday, and he’s aware of the coincidental name, and has even thought of writing a Fenton Johnson on Fenton Johnson piece.

**The early 20^th century Republican party shares little but the name with the current political faction. On the matter of Afro-American civil rights it was, however faintly, still “The Party of Lincoln,” and many of the more ardent Black advocates were at least nominally Republicans. They were also the party more associated with business interests, government reform, moral probity and alcohol regulation. At least in his writing, Johnson seems earnestly on the side of moral probity.

One speculation, Johnson may have hoped for a political patronage job either in Chicago or in Washington. His early model, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, had received such an appointment.

***Anyone who’s seen the play or movie The Front Page,  the uproarious farce of Chicago newspapering in this era, may remember the inept and corrupt mayor who was worrying about the effect of his stances on the black vote. That’s Thompson in the eyes of Hecht and MacArthur.

****When the wry alien stranger monologist in Hendrix’s song says “I have been here before, in the days of ice,” I wonder if Hendrix, who was aware of his mother’s First Nation’s heritage, was accidently, subconsciously, or intentionally thinking of the ice-age nomads who crossed over into North America. It’s a common trope to wonder what Hendrix the guitar hero would have done if only he’d not suffered the accidental sleeping pill overdose in 1970. May I offer an alternative: what if he’d grown to more fully consider his Afro-American and Indigenous heritage as a writer and Science Fiction aficionado?