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.”