Poet in Pine Mill

All freedom, all slayed me buried in my great destination freedom. The Chicago Defender and Station WMAQ bring you Destination Freedom, a new radio series

dramatizing the great democratic traditions of the Negro people, interwoven in the pageant of history, and a part of America's own destination freedom. Today, Destination Freedom tells the story of James Weldon Johnson, poet, educator, and lobbyist in a chapter entitled, Poet in Pine Mill.

My name is Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, in Florida, Men Numey as an editor and a lawyer. In New York, I was a poet and a writer of songs. In Venezuela, I was a counsel for my country.

But in Washington in 1920, men knew me as a lobbyist with a new bill in my briefcase, with the outline of a law against lawlessness. No one had brought it up before. I took it to a friend I had in the Senate.

He thought about it. He looked it over. A bill to outlaw lynching, is it? You expect me to sponsor a bill to outlaw lynching Johnson? That's why I'm here. But you can't stop lynching with the law no more than you can stop murder.

There's a law against murder. What is lynching? Murder in a way, but still this is too new. Nobody in the Senate will support it. When they see and feel the thing I've seen, they will.

I don't know, Johnson. I know we've just finished a war on things that are unsettled. Ray Tryats and East St. Louis and Chicago and lynchings. That's at the bottom of it, I don't know. But it's too early for your bill.

He said too early, but I knew it was late. It was past time to save lives with a lord and lynching. I went from friend to friend until I came into the room of an old senator who was wise and said, Yes, I've heard of this anti-lynch bill you're carrying around.