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Samuel Johnson Research Paper

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Samuel Johnson, a black man who lived in the late 1700s to early 1800s, began his life as a slave, but was able to earn his freedom in his early adult years. Racist laws, social behaviors, and events, prevented Johnson from living a normal life. The obstacles he faced, from having to earn his and his family’s freedom to being repressed from the racist behavior that resulted from Turner’s Rebellion, proved that it was merely the color of his skin that determined the course of his life. Despite the fact Samuel Johnson became legally free, he still dealt with the prejudices of a country weighed down by the chains of slavery.
In his early years, Samuel Johnson was a slave who worked under his master, Edward Digges, in a tavern. Working in the …show more content…

Whites would refer to him and his family using derogatory language, extending even to legal documents (p43). White people considered themselves superior to him, and assumed that Johnson and his family were unintelligent, based solely on the fact they were black (p44). Even though Johnson was now a free man, for the rest of his life he would be a slave to the endeavor of ensuring that his family would be able to stay in Virginia once he set them free. Without a granted request to stay in the state, if his family was emancipated and refused to leave the state, they could be captured and sold back into slavery. In an attempt to prevent this, he spent the rest of his life writing petitions requesting that his family be granted to stay in Virginia. He wrote more than 10 petitions — all signed by white people that Johnson had gained the respect of — over the next several decades of his life, but not one of the petitions was granted (p75). He continued to agonize over the future of his family until he died in 1842 (p125). His final effort to ensure the future safety of his family was to include in his will a plea to three trustees to request that Johnson’s family could remain in Virginia (p123). Johnson’s petitions were not granted because the congressmen of that time were not apt to grant favors to black people and did not want a growth of blacks in the community. This

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Some of James Weldon Johnson’s other published work includes Fifty Years and Other Poems which was published in 1917 and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man which was about a man who was light enough to pass as a white man and was published anonymously in 1912 and then again under Johnson’s name in 1927. Fifty Years and Other Poems, showed his political perspective of the African American influences that he portrayed throughout his writing and the poem “Fifty Years”, commemorated the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. He also published Black Manhattan, which was the first history of African Americans in New York City in 1930. Johnson has many other published works that described both how African Americans had to live and how they were trying to live during the Harlem Renaissance and the “new negro”

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A famous African American author and civil rights leader by the name of James Weldon Johnson “was deeply committed to exposing the injustice and brutality imposed on African Americans throughout the United States, especially in the Jim Crow South”

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