While “Africa” historically figured as a fulcrum in African American literature for interrogating Blacks’ sociopolitical status in America, by the 1930s this relation had distinctly sharpened. Black American responses to the Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–36) and to Marcus Garvey’s failed populist “Back to Africa” campaign demonstrate how the 1930s marked a crucible in Black radical thought: civil and economic rights took on a global cast; colonialism and imperialism were read as patterned acts of aggression against Black and brown people; and US segregation emerged as yet another name for and variation on fascism. By the 1930s, Black Leftists almost obsessively attended to the racialized failures and frustrations of this historical moment in an effort to imagine and articulate new, pragmatic, and at times revolutionary strategies for addressing the Negro problem on a domestic and a global scale. The 1930s are bookmarked by attempts to both historicize Blackness and Black achievements on a micro and macro scale and concurrently imagine a way forward toward democracy.

Using God’s Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson’s major collection of poetry from the New Negro Renaissance, this chapter outlines the author’s view of the tension between American popular culture and vernacular African American expressive forms, presenting his theory of poetic expression and linguistic transcription through call and response and the author’s close relationship to this work. Johnson viewed popular culture ambivalently, as a necessary yet potentially reductive force. In its greatest potential, it could form a people’s poetry, and in so doing create a distinctly racial art that was also national. God’s Trombones was therefore more than a simple linguistic project, it was an endeavor to draw upon “symbols from within” African American folk and vernacular forms, and also from within the nation’s regions, to advance a national African American culture.