After a Thousand Tears: Poems

By Georgia Douglas Johnson and Maureen Honey

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966) was the most prolific female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1877 in Atlanta, Georgia, Johnson devoted much of her artistic imagination to indexing African American women’s interior life and advancing the means through which to achieve interracial cooperation. After a Thousand Tears represents the only extant poetry collection that Johnson authored between 1928 and 1962, and it illustrates her more nuanced and transgressive prescription for gender, racial, and national advancement.

Although scholars have critically examined Johnson’s four previously published collections of poetry (The Heart of a Woman [1918], Bronze [1922], An Autumn Love Cycle [1928], and Share My World [1962]), they have never engaged After a Thousand Tears. Jimmy Worthy II located the unpublished work while conducting archival research at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Worthy discovered that while Johnson intended to publish Tears with Padma Publications of Bombay in 1947, the project never came to fruition. Published now, for the first time, this volume features eighty-one poems that offer Johnson’s intimate and forthright sensibility toward African American women’s lived experiences during and following the Harlem Renaissance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780820362847

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966) was an African American poet and playwright. Born in Atlanta, she excelled in school from a young age, learning to read, write, and play violin. She graduated from Atlanta University’s Normal School in 1896 before working briefly as a teacher Marietta, Georgia. In 1902, having decided to become a professional musician, she enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she studied music theory and learned the art of composition. She later returned to Atlanta, marrying prominent lawyer and Republican party member Henry Lincoln Johnson, with whom she had two sons. After moving to Washington, D.C. in 1910, she embarked on a literary career against her husband’s wishes, submitting poems to journals around the country. She published her first collection, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918) to modest acclaim and continued to grow her reputation with poems in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Following her husband’s death in 1925, she supported herself and her sons with various jobs and maintained a staggering output of poems, plays, short stories, and newspaper columns. She also began hosting prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance at her home, which she called the S Street Salon, providing a meeting place for such legendary artists and intellectuals as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence. She is recognized today as a prominent anti-lynching activist, a pioneering poet, and one of the first African American woman playwrights.

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