James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (JWJ) documents and celebrates the cultural and artistic achievements and the intellectual and political activities of African Americans.

  • Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)

    January 13, 2024

    King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

  • Writing and Resistance: 2024 Black History Month Display

    January 8, 2024

    Materials related to a temporary display on the Beinecke Library mezzanine, January 8 - March 18, 2024, for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Black History Month, and in conjunction with the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, 2024) and the exhibition Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, on view from mid-February at the New Haven Museum.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Office Hours with… Nana Adusei-Poku

    November 13, 2023

    Who is an artist who particularly interests you for this project? Adusei-Poku: Augusta Savage, a sculptress from the Harlem Renaissance who was very active in the early 20th century. The reason why I’m so fascinated by her is that not only can you see in her biography how anti-Blackness consistently made it impossible for her to work, but also we don’t have many of her works left. They are only represented through photographs and yet she was a formative figure of a modernist movement. One reason why I’m so happy to be here at Yale is that we have this incredible archive in the Beinecke [Rare Book & Manuscript Library] and the Yale Art Gallery Collection that’s like a treasure for people who are interested in Black artists from New York in the early 20th century.

  • Pondering the power of art in protest

    September 26, 2023

    “Art, Protest, & the Archives,” an exhibition at the Beinecke Library, explores the connections between dissent and artistic expression over the past century.