Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Weldon Johnson

There is praise in James Weldon Johnson's line, but it comes wrapped in a paternal warning that feels deliberately tactical. Writing as a poet and cultural broker of the early 20th century, Johnson is defending the artistic seriousness of Black spirituals at a moment when white America was eager to sentimentalize them as folk curiosities or mine them for commercial novelty. His sentence tries to reframe them as national art with deep craft and history.

The edge is in "as yet" and "do not fully appreciate". Johnson isn't questioning the songs; he's questioning the conditions that shape taste. Under slavery, spirituals were survival technology: coded communication, communal therapy, portable theology. After emancipation, the same culture that produced them was pushed toward respectability politics, formal education, and "uplift" ideals that could make the old songs feel like an embarrassing reminder of bondage rather than a repository of genius. Johnson is naming that internal tension without giving ammunition to outsiders. He implies: if even Black audiences undervalue these works, white gatekeepers will keep dismissing them as primitive.

The word "themselves" is the quiet provocation. It suggests a gap between ownership and valuation, a community estranged from its own archive because history has trained it to equate refinement with distance from the plantation. Johnson's intent is preservation with an agenda: elevate spirituals from background music to literature, from nostalgia to evidence. The subtext is urgency. A tradition that isn't claimed can be appropriated, diluted, or lost, and Johnson is trying to get there first - with authority, with criticism, with love that refuses to be merely sentimental.