The James Weldon Johnson Residence located at 187 West 135th Street, Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, is where James Weldon Johnson lived from 1925 until his death in 1938. In addition to being a composer, song writer, and author, he was an outspoken advocate for civil rights, working in various roles at the NAACP, including General Secretary.
The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Famous quotes containing the words james, weldon, johnson and/or residence:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)