James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (JWJ) documents and celebrates the cultural and artistic achievements and the intellectual and political activities of African Americans.

Claude McKay in Our Time: A Conversation with Gary Holcomb and William J. Maxwell on “Romance in Marseille” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
October 23, 2020
GEH: I didn’t discover the originally archived text. The shorter version has been available in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since the 1940s. Sometime along the way, the longer, probably later version appeared in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collection when his daughter, Hope Virtue McKay, contributed it, we think.
New Scholarship: Ben Glaser "Modernism's Metronome"
October 19, 2020

Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics by Ben Glaser; forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press From the publisher: Despite...
Art & Protest: A Conversation
October 14, 2020

See, download, and share poster From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street , Bolotnaya Square to Nuit debout , the Arab Spring , the Movement of the...
The Ballot and Me by Langston Hughes: An Historical Sequence, 1956
October 1, 2020

The Langston Hughes Papers are the single most consulted collection in the Beinecke Library’s vast archives. Part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial...
Carrie Langston: An Important Suffragist Everyone Should Know (Washington Informer)
September 30, 2020
Workshop inspired creative expression in cellblocks
September 24, 2020
When a student named Justin wrote pieces for a creative writing workshop offered by the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) this summer, he felt like he was sharing his heart with the world. The workshop, which was offered to inmates at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institute in Suffield, Connecticut, made him feel his heart was “treated as a heart should be,” Justin said.
Lola Hayes and "Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music" (WNYC)
August 31, 2020
The November 29th program considered "the musical setting of poems by Langston Hughes and included the bard himself. "Langston Hughes was guest of honor and punctuated his interview with a reading from his opera Troubled Island."[2] The original Hughes-annotated WNYC script is below.
Archives : Nina Simone se dévoile dans une lettre à Langston Hughes (ActuaLitté)
August 24, 2020
Parmi les archives numériques de la Beinecke Library on trouve la correspondance que le poète et romancier Langston Hughes a entretenue avec Nina Simone. Les feuillets froissés nous plongent dans le quotidien de la chanteuse et dévoilent une artiste à la fois enjouée et en colère, fatiguée par son travail.
Introduction to Creative Writing: Co-Sponsored Class
August 12, 2020

Well known on campus and around the world as a site of important historical documents of all kinds, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript is also a regional...
Treasure Trove Of Frederick Douglass Artifacts, Including Family Letters, Comes To Yale (WBUR)
July 28, 2020
One of the most extraordinary Americans in history is getting a new spotlight.