The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
A masterpiece of American literature, James Weldon Johnson's emotionally charged work is still going strong over eight decades after its first anonymous publication. It is a landmark in the annals of black literary history.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the first fictitious memoir ever published by a Black person, inspired Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright among other writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It also offered white readers a shockingly fresh perspective on their own society in the 1920s and beyond, making them aware of the double standard of racial identification placed on African Americans.
The novel, which takes place at the turn of the century in America, tells the story of a mulatto man who can "pass" for white thanks to his light complexion. It follows his journey from a black college in Jacksonville to an exclusive nightclub in New York, and from the rural South to the white suburbs of the Northeast.
This is a hymn to the agony of forming an identity in a country fixated on color—a powerful, unsentimental analysis of race in America. Furthermore, as noted by Arna Bontemps many years ago, "the problems of the artist [as presented here] seem as contemporary as if the book had been written this year."
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