His poem “Fifty Years,” published on page one of The New York Times on January 1, 1913, commemorated a half-century of Black freedom and remains one of the most compelling statements of African American birthright ever imagined:
For never let the thought arise
That we are here on sufferance bare;
Outcasts, asylumed ’neath these skies,
And aliens without part or share.
This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.
Johnson was further a major organizer of the Silent Protest March against lynching, sponsored by the NAACP, in 1917, which filled Fifth Avenue in New York with 10,000 disciplined, peaceful Black people in an event unlike anyone had ever seen.
He also stood shudderingly aware of the revival in the 1920s of the Ku Klux Klan, epitomized by the extraordinary march of some 30,000 hooded and robed Klansmen from all over the country down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1925. They had arrived in the capital, in part, on some 18 trains specially reserved for KKK marchers. The Klansmen’s highly organized demonstration went in the opposite direction from Trump’s crowds on January 6. They trekked from the Capitol to the Treasury Department and then to the base of the Washington Monument. On their banners, they announced themselves for “America First” and “100 percent Americanism.” They brought many crosses to the march, and they intermittently sang rousing choruses of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And they brandished their nativist, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic ideology in a host of visual ways.
On the following day, hordes of Klansmen gathered again, across the Potomac in Arlington, first at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, erected only four years earlier. After laying wreaths at the tomb, a crowd estimated at 75,000 gathered at the horse grounds of Arlington for a cross-burning. As darkness arrived, long lines of Klansmen circled the 80-foot-high cross fashioned from a Virginia tree, each carrying an American flag. Press reports and photo captions remarked that many of the Klansmen were bold enough that they removed their hoods. The Washington Post reported a traffic jam, “the heaviest since the burial of the unknown soldier.”
All this and more animated Johnson in his New York apartment years later, as he reimagined a Washington Klan march. “St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day” begins with images of heaven as a place of fatigue and weariness. “Archangels” showed “signs of age,” and even the “celestial choir” exhibited “a woeful want of pristine fire.” Ages of bliss had fallen into “monotony.” The angelic hosts asked St. Peter to enliven them with “reminiscences of heavenly history.”
So St. Peter “stroked his beard” and “fumbled with his keys,” and a story “flashed” in his mind, “the one / About the unknown soldier / who came from Washington.” “’Twas Resurrection morn,” cried St. Peter, “And Gabriel blew a blast upon his horn.” And as “A shudder shook the world.… From the four corners of all the earth they drew, / Their faces radiant and their bodies new.”
Then St. Peter announced that “within the great American border / There was an issuance of a special order.” The “high potentate of Klandom” proclaimed to his flock
That all the trusty patriotic mentors,
And duly qualified Hundred Percenters
Should forthwith gather together upon the banks
Of the Potomac, there to form their ranks,
March to the tomb, by orders to be given,
And escort the unknown soldier up to heaven.