Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was one of the most famous - and notorious - women in the early twentieth century. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin's Bolshevik experiment, and more.
James Weldon Johnson (1876–1938), who wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice” with his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, was a poet, novelist, Broadway lyricist, civil rights activist, and diplomat. Johnson expressed a diverse range of views about different subjects, including the affinities between African-Americans and Jews.
As Leonard Dinnerstein’s “Antisemitism in America” notes, in a 1918 essay published in The New York Age, an African American newspaper, Johnson wrote of “the two million Jews [who] have a controlling interest in the finances of the nation.” Yet he nevertheless urged fellow blacks to “draw encouragement and hope from the experiences of modern Jews.”