James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. Both his father James, a resort hotel headwaiter, and his mother Helen Dillet Johnson, a schoolteacher, had lived in the North as free blacks. James and his brother John grew up in cultured and economically secure surroundings that were unusual among Southern black families at the time. Since high schools were closed to blacks in Jacksonville, Johnson left home to attend both secondary school and college at Atlanta University, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1894. It was during his college years that he first became aware of the depth of the racial problem in the United States, and Johnson's experience teaching black school children in a poor district of rural Georgia during two summers left a deep impression on him. The struggles and aspirations of American blacks form a central theme in the thirty or so poems that Johnson wrote as a student.

In 1895 Johnson founded the Daily American, the first black-oriented daily newspaper in the United States. Although the newspaper folded the following year, Johnson's ambitious effort attracted the attention of such prominent black leaders as W. E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Around this time Johnson also read law with the help of a local white lawyer, and in 1898 he became the first black lawyer admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. During this time he continued to write poetry and discovered his talent for songwriting. In 1901 he set out to New York City to seek fortune writing songs for musical theater. His love for NYC is expressed in his work "My City".

While in New York, he became involved in Republic Politics. Following his intense involvement with the party, he was appointed Consul to Venezuela and later to Nicaragua. He later returned to New York and became the editorial writer for the New York Age, the city's oldest black newspaper.

In 1920 he became secretary general of the NAACP. He coordinated an effective movement against racism at the time. At the end of 1930, fatigued by the stresses of his job and wanting more time to write, Johnson resigned his position and accepted a part-time teaching post in creative writing at Fisk University. In 1938 Johnson's distinguished career was brought to an end when a train struck the car he was riding to his summer home in Maine.