Charles S. Johnson: Entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes wrote in 1940 that Charles S. Johnson “did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920’s than anyone else in America.”¹ A generation later Arna Bontemps observed that Charles S. Johnson, along with Alain Locke, and others have “been called the nursemaids of … [the] Renaissance.”² Yet, a decade after Bontemps’s observation, Charles Spurgeon Johnson remains an enigma. Older, white intellectuals vaguely remember him as a sociologist in race relations. Black intellectuals, if they predate the era of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., remember him, of course. But they are most likely to recall that he was the first black president of Fisk University or that, for over a decade, he directed the Race Relations Institute at Fisk. Only recently have scholars begun seriously to evaluate the role of Charles S. Johnson in the generation that prepared the way for the Freedom Movement.³