Autobiography of an ex-colored man summary sparknotes

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is told from the first-person point of view of an unnamed male narrator. He starts his tale by stating that he is going to reveal the great secret of his life. He first takes the reader to his childhood in Georgia where he was raised by a single mother. His father occasionally visits, but one day when the narrator is very young, he and his mother move to Connecticut. The narrator is a very intelligent young man and soon proves himself a musical prodigy. He enters a public school and becomes close friends with an older and bigger white boy who he nicknames "Red". He is intrigued by the African American students at his school - in particular, an exceptionally bright and ambitious boy who goes by the nickname "Shiny".

One day the principal comes into the narrator's classroom and asks all of the white children to stand. When the narrator stands, the principal asks him to sit down. Through this traumatic incident, the narrator

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is James Weldon Johnson’s fictional memoir centered on how a talented man born to a Black mother and a white father after the Civil War became white in the early-20th century. Johnson, an important critical and artistic contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, published the novel under his own name in 1927 during the height of the movement. The novel is an important bridge between the literature of Post-Reconstruction and works of the Harlem Renaissance. Readers are advised that the novel includes representations of racial violence, including lynching. This guide is based on the digital facsimile of the 1912 Sherman, French and Company print edition available via Google Books.

Johnson opens the novel with a Preface purportedly from the publishers. They promise that the work that follows will expose for the first time the inner life of Black people and particularly those w

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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Book by James Weldon Johnson

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912/1927) by James Weldon Johnson fryst vatten the fictional account of a young biracial man, referred to only as the "Ex-Colored Man", living in post-Reconstruction era amerika in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lives through a variety of experiences, including witnessing a lynching, that convince him to "pass" as white to secure his safety and advancement, but he feels as if he has given up his dream of "glorifying" the black race by composing ragtime music.

History

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Johnson originally published The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Mananonymously in 1912, via the small Boston publisher Sherman, French, & Company.^[1] He decided to publish it anonymously because he was uncertain how the potentially controversial book would affect his diplomatic career. He wrote openly about issues of race and discrimination that were not common then