Fifty Years and Other Poems

As have many African American poets before him, James Weldon Johnson found inspiration in the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. His commemorative poem "Fifty Years" is "one of the noblest commemorative poems yet written by any American" according to his professor at Columbia, Brander Matthews. While there is a section of poems written in Negro dialect, most of the other poems strive to reach what Johnson himself stated the Negro poet's goal to be in The Book of American Negro Poetry: "He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions, and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and widest scope of treatment."