Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1877?–1966)

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a multitalented artist of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance era who wrote poetry, plays, short stories, music, and newspaper columns from her home in Washington, D.C. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was a member of Atlanta University’s Normal School class of 1893. She studied music at Oberlin College and wrote songs from 1908 until 1959.

Saturday Night at the S Street Salon

This chapter introduces one of the most understudied communities of New Negro writers. Commencing in the 1920s, African American writer Georgia Douglas Johnson invited writers to her home on Saturday evenings to encourage the development of a cohesive and supportive community of black writers. With a particular emphasis on the writing of African American women, the S Street Salon evolved into a viable space for African American women writers to workshop their poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Many of the New Negro era literary works produced by African American women participants of the S Street Salon tackled politically significant and contentious issues such as racial and sexual violence and women’s reproductive rights. Most of the well-known New Negro writers participated in a Saturday session at the S Street Salon. The S Street Salon was arguably one of the most significant intellectual, political, and cultural communities of the New Negro era. This community pivoted around African American women’s expressivity. The women of the S Street Salon inserted their stories and their voices into black public culture through creating an African American women-centered counterpublic.

The Black Mother/Wife

This chapter focuses on plays written by Georgia Douglas Johnson in the late 1920s as she hosted a literary salon in her Washington, D.C., home. These texts present the black mother/wife, whose existence is shaped by attempts to delay death. In Blue Blood, she prevents the murder of the men in her family by hiding the fact that she has been raped by a powerful white man. In Safe, she becomes desperate to avoid what she believes to be the inevitable fate of her newborn son: humiliating death at the hands of a mob. In Blue-Eyed Black Boy, she protects her adult son, but ultimately her success in stopping the mob underscores her family's vulnerability. In short, Johnson shows that the black mother/wife must forge romantic and parental bonds in a society that allows white men to rape black women and kill black men with impunity.

The Black Lawyer

This chapter traces the shift in the community conversation from an emphasis on black soldiers who return from fighting overseas and must be defended by white attorneys to the increasing visibility of black lawyers. Crisis magazine coverage notes this shift, and lynching dramas similarly identify the black attorney as a figure embodying the race's faith in truth and justice. The mob's target in A Sunday Morning in the South (of which author Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote white-church and black-church versions) aspires to be a lawyer. In For Unborn Children by Myrtle Smith Livingston, the mob's victim is already an attorney. Placing a spotlight on these men, the scripts preserve community perspectives that are rejected by courts of law and the court of public opinion.