James Weldon Johnson – The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

In his book Johnson talks about a distinct difference in social perception of the individual between white and colored people, and often highlights the struggle that results from it, especially for the colored individuals. Even though many of the black people might not perceive it as such in their everyday life, they nevertheless fight for something. This fight has changed dramatically over time, however, as it has gone from the fight for a mere recognition as a human being towards a fight for social acceptance. He says, he is able to see this struggle through his observations of black people in the South, because he did not see himself as a member of the black race until he was introduced to it in his days in Jacksonville. As he describes it, his stay in the city “was really my entrance into the race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race” (22). By stating this, Johnson wants to tell the reader that he is a kind of participant observer rather than a “regular” black man, thus giving his book the credits it would need throughout the readers of this book. Later on Johnson also mentions the way white people devote many of their resources towards this fight, as they want to upkeep the old status of the superiority of their race. He describes this struggle as the main reason for socioeconomic problems throughout the South that were existent at those times. Johnson also states that this fight between the races determines much of the social behavior of individuals of either race, since they view themselves as “white” or “black” and feel a strong need to act accordingly. However, he never explicitly includes himself in these descriptions, as if he wanted to remind the reader of his more or less neutral status as an observer, who is both by appearance and education what would be considered “white”, but nevertheless by his heritage able to attend to social events of black that no person of the other race would be allowed to. All in all Johnson describes the struggle that goes on between blacks and whites as an exhausting one, the end of which would serve members of both races well. 

James Weldon Johnson describes the influence music has on the main character and his life as very big. Apart from several classical compositions he emphasizes the playing of ragtime music as at first a fascination, and then more and more a means of income for the main character. Ragtime is a type of music that developed in St. Louis and New Orleans from the late 1800s on and was most popular between 1897 and 1918, when jazz music became more popular. A very famous composer of that times was Scott Joplin, who wrote many ragtime hits. His first hit, "Maple Leaf Rag" can be heard in the video posted below. SInce those times, there had been many revivals of the music, why many of the themes and melodies are still known to many people even today. Ragtime as a style of music also influenced many classical composers like Stravinsky or Satie.

Johnson often describes, how his main character variates the classical music he knows from his formal musical education in his younger years, and plays a ragtime version of those compositions. The video below shows, what such a conversion would sound like, taking Beethoven's  "Für Elise" as a base theme.