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View allThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Johnson
1912
A confession, published anonymously, about crossing the color line for good.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson · 1912
Published without its author's name in 1912, this novel was mistaken by many early readers for a genuine memoir — a confusion James Weldon Johnson didn't correct until a 1927 reissue, by which point he was a major NAACP leader and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Framed as one man's confession, it follows a light-skinned narrator from a Connecticut boyhood, through immersion in Black musical life and the ragtime clubs of New York, to a final, deliberate decision to pass as white — and it treats that decision not as triumph or tragedy alone, but as a real and costly choice, made inside a color line the book renders both rigid and strangely permeable.
11 chapters · 51,441 words · ~3.9 hr read
Contents
Chapters
The narrator tells his own story across eleven chapters — from a Connecticut boyhood and the discovery of his racial identity, through immersion in Black musical life in Jacksonville and New York, to the deliberate choice that closes the book.