"A Splendid Missionary for the Race": James Weldon Johnson, Creative Writing, And Race Work At Fisk University, 1931–1938.

James Weldon Johnson wore many hats throughout his public life. His work as an academic, however, is rarely discussed in scholarship. In 1931, he left the NAACP to accept the Adam K. Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University, a historically Black college, where he held the position until his death seven years later. His conceptualization of Fisk's creative writing program as a space for Black world-creation and radical resistance contrasts sharply with today's popular perceptions of creative writing as a "white" space within the contemporary academy. This paper frames Johnson's time at Fisk as an important and often-overlooked aspect of his civil rights work, and recovers the history of HBCUs as pioneers in the advancement of creative writing as an academic discipline and an instrument for social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]