Cosmopolitanism in Georgia Douglas Johnson's anti-lynching literature

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by C.C. O'Brien

After four more short paragraphs wherein the narrator celebrates Ann's power, compares her to Christ, and insists that the reader may not believe the truth about Ann, she finally proclaims, "Well, Ann Leigh is a cosmopolite--she is vari-blooded and into this fusion is that most potent drop which bleeds, controls, and claims all others, Ann Leigh all comprehending has the whole world in her hand--in her mind--in her heart she is a world-woman. We call her Negro?" (Box 162-3 Folder 4). The language in Johnson's brief description of Ann Leigh, particularly the phrase "world spirit," calls to mind Locke's figuration of the culture-citizen. Through varied labels for cosmopolitanism, emerging from the Hellenic base "world-citizen," Johnson's racially ambiguous subject embodies a political perspective at once individual and collective, "Negro" and transcendent.

Johnson's revelation that "that most potent drop" of African blood infuses this charismatic woman's spirit should surprise an anticipated white audience in the 1920s. The concept of world-woman or world spirit emanates from a humble origin--the roots of African American culture that value community and interpersonal relations as measures of success. Johnson's textually imagined world, furthermore, amalgamates European and African wisdom. The "potent drop" of blood, inherited from a people whom history transported across hemispheres, also conveys the wisdom to convert the most racist, man-hating-man. As a messenger of peace, Johnson's cosmopolite offers redemption to a violent, racially striated world. At the same time, this centers peace and justice in her ancestral home--Africa.

Johnson frequently refers to the metaphor of blood as a medium for intermingling various geographies worldwide. Her poem "Common Dust" uses the metaphor of dust in a religious sense ("ashes to ashes, dust to dust") and also as a means of combining various regions of the earth: "Here lies the dust of Africa;/Here are the sons of Rome;/Here lies one unlabelled/The World at large his home?" (9-12). Johnson references blood to signal a future where the formerly vast spatial divisions of the geography of the human race meld into one. The reference to Rome, an empire risen and fallen much like that of ancient Ethiopia, accompanies the "unlabelled one" that is probably the United States.

I read "the unlabelled one" as the US because Johnson was heavily invested in Republican politics and in America's future. Her poems "Cosmopolite" and "Fusion" both signal great potential in the new hybrid of racial identity that results from miscegenation in the United States. Beginning with the image of a gardener splicing hybrid roses, the speaker of "Fusion" exalts her mixed racial origins: "I trace within my warring blood/The tributary sources,/They potentially commingle/And sweep/With new-born forces?" (7-11). With religious fervor, Johnson's speakers anticipate the new-born world where races reunite in the space of individual bodies, and warring nations overcome geopolitical conflicts to unite in a global, multicultural syncretism. For example, the speaker of "The Man to Be" is almost messianic in importance. The mixed-race subjects of Johnson's poems struggle intensely as they prophesy the future of a human race reunited and intertwined through the forces of slavery and colonialism. The speaker of "The Man to Be" proclaims: "Life charges through my veins--mixed forces guide the reins.... These fierce contending bloods/Churn in the depths of me/Merged in a mighty sea.... Oh White men, Black and Red/Look through God's lens and see/This fused intensity" (2-3, 9-11, 13-15).