“Modernity’s Usable Pasts: James Weldon Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and Charles B. Falls’s God’s Trombones”
Kristin Schwain, Luce Visiting Assistant Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts,
Department of Religion, Boston University
In 1927, the African American author, diplomat, and songwriter James Weldon Johnson published a series of poems intended to preserve the sermons of “old-time Negro preacher[s]” before they vanished from the American scene. The opening prayer and seven sermons were accompanied by images produced by one of the foremost visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, and lettering fashioned by one of nation’s leading illustrators, Charles B. Falls. This lecture showed how the interplay between and among Johnson’s poems, Douglas’s illustrations, and Falls’s typography is central to achieving the writer’s explicit goal of reenacting the antebellum sermon, as well as his implicit aims of constructing a usable past and celebrating an African American spirit.