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O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?

— James Weldon Johnson Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917)

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More quotes by James Weldon Johnson

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic.

Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

Young man—Young man—Your arm’s too short to box with God.

God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Weldon Johnson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.