Harlem Renaissance Women: Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 14, 1966), an American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and a member of the Harlem Renaissance.  She wrote four books of poems, 28 plays and 32 song lyrics.  Plumes was published under the pen name John Temple.  Many of her plays were never published because of her gender and race.  Gloria Hull is credited with the rediscovery of many of Johnson's plays. The 28 plays that she wrote were divided into four sections: "Primitive Life Plays", "Plays of Average Negro Life", "Lynching Plays" and "Radio Plays". Several of her plays are lost. In 1926, Johnson's play "Blue Blood" won honorable mention in the Opportunity drama contest. Her play "Plumes" also won in the same competition in 1927.  Johnson was one of the only women whose work was published in Alain Locke'santhology Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. 

Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became forty years of weekly "Saturday Salons", for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset,Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence— all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as theHarlem Renaissance.  Johnson called her home the "Half Way House" for friends traveling, and a place where they "could freely discuss politics and personal opinions" and where those with no money and no place to stay would be welcome.

She died in Washington, D.C., in 1966.  In September 2009,  Johnson was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame

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The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars,

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.