Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family

Fenton Johnson was both poet and journalist. His Champion Magazine (1916-1917) pioneered a monthly digest format aimed at a nascent black middle-class audience interested in “Negro Achievement” from sports, theatre, and popular musical entertainment to business, politics, military service, and the professions, to art and literature. Although Johnson proved inept as a literary entrepreneur and contradictory in ideology, his first journal was richly cosmopolitan in scope and highly professional in writing, design, and layout. Johnson’s local collaborators included older African American intellectuals such as George Washington Ellis, Richard T. Greener, John Roy Lynch, and W. H. A. Moore. Besides more accurately locating Fenton Johnson in African American cultural history, this chapter sheds light on black writing and thought on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance.