a

In a slow and dignified manner.

b

These lyrics are from the song “Nigger, nigger, never die,” published in 1898. William Osborne wrote the lyrics, and Nellie Sylvester composed the music.

c

King of the tribe Judah and of the kingdom of Israel, David is credited with authoring the biblical Psalms.

d

Israelite leader renowned for his strength and betrayed by his lover, Delilah.

e

Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) succeeded in gaining the independence of Scotland from England through his military campaigns against Edward I and Edward II in the early fourteenth century.

f

In Greek mythology, Elysium was the happy resting place for heroes who had died.

g

Immensely popular antislavery novel, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) and published in 1852.

h

Allusion to a well-known 1861 lecture by American abolitionist Wendell Phillips on Toussaint L’Ouverture (c.1743-1803), a black revolutionary who was instrumental in gaining freedom for slaves in Haiti beginning in 1791.

i

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped slavery in Maryland and went on to become a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, writer, and social reformer.

j

French writer Alexandre Dumas, père (1802-1870), had a grandmother of African ancestry.

k

James Weldon Johnson graduated from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in 1894.

l

Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773), the fourth earl of Chesterfield, was an English statesman renowned for his courtly manners and elegance. A series of letters he had written to his son was published in 1774.

m

Born in St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies, Peter “The Black Prince” Jackson (1861-1901) was one of the greatest boxers of his generation, winning the British Empire Championship belt in 1892. *Reference to the description of the heroine’s eyes in Trilby (1894), a novel by George Du Maurier (1834-1896).

n

Johnson’s narrator has staked his claim to New York City’s Garment and Flatiron Districts, renowned for their clubs and commerce.

o

Abbreviation for the Grand Army of the Republic, a patriotic fraternal organization made up of veterans of the Union forces during the American Civil War.

p

In a black church, the mourners’ bench is the front pew where sinners, mourners, and those experiencing crises of faith seek the direct intervention of church elders and preachers, especially during revival meetings.

q

Numidia was an ancient kingdom in northern Africa that roughly corresponds to present-day Algeria.

r

From The New York Age (March 14, 1915).

s

Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905) was the second in a trilogy that also included The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Traitor (1907). American director D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman into a silent film, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915.

t

Writer and social critic Joel Elias Spingarn (1875-1939) taught comparative literature at Columbia University and was an early leader in the NAACP. ^†The NAACP continued its denunciation of The Birth of a Nation although it did open in New York City, causing disturbances and protests.

u

From Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917).

v

See endnote 9 to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
^*In Greek mythology, Antaeus, the son of Poseidon, the sea god, and Gaia, the
earth goddess, was a giant and a wrestler of great strength.

w

From Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917). *Johnson refers to German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Johnson’s ex-colored man is also classically trained before he encounters the folk sounds that lead to his experiments with ragtime music.

x

Variation of “paean”: a song of praise. ^‡ Celestial; of the highest heaven.

y

From Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917).

z

From The New York Age (August 17, 1918).

aa

American publisher Adolph Simon Ochs (1858-1935) acquired the New York Times in 1896 and brought it to national prominence.

ab

Ralph Henry Graves (1878-1939) was Sunday editor of the New York Times from 1917 to 1923.

ac

Allusion to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (act 2, scene 1).

ad

From The New York Age (September 13, 1919).

ae

Born in England, Martin B. Madden (1855-1928) immigrated early in life to the United States, where he became wealthy and served in the House of Representatives for twenty-three years.

af

Excerpt from the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).

ag

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was an Irish playwright. See also endnote 2 to Other Writings.