Grace Nail Johnson

Grace Nail Johnson (February 27, 1885 – November 1, 1976) was an African-American civil rights activist and patron of the arts associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and wife of the writer and politician James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was the daughter of John Bennett Nail, a wealthy businessman and civil rights activist. She is known for her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Heterodoxy Club, and many other African-American and feminist organizations. Johnson also supported and promoted African-American children's literature.

Early life and family Grace Elizabeth Nail was born on February 27, 1885, in New London, Connecticut. She was the second child of real estate developer John Bennett Nail (1853–1942) and Mary Frances Robinson (1858–1923). By the time Grace was born, the Nails had already become prominent members of the African-American elite of New York City. While the family was very involved with the Harlem community, their residence was in Brooklyn, where Grace would live for all her early life.

The Nail family business began with a restaurant and hotel in New York City on Sixth Avenue which they called "Nail Brothers". The Nails also participated in many artistic and intellectual circles in and out of Harlem. Some of those circles included other prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Career Grace Nail Johnson was involved in the Harlem Renaissance as a hostess, mentor, teacher and activist in various civil rights causes. She was well known for hosting the African-American political and artistic elites of the time and organizing events centered around popular Harlem artists.

Johnson's political activism was not limited to organizations based in Harlem as at one point, she was the only black member of a feminist group based in Greenwich Village known as the Heterodoxy Club. The club was founded as a women's liberal discussion group but quickly adopted a feminist angle. This placed her in middle of the early stages of the Harlem Renaissance as a member of a category of activists that would later be called the "lyrical left". The parade took place on 5th Avenue, just one block from the Nail family restaurant.

She also became politically involved outside of New York. Nella Larsen, an American novelist, once recalled traveling with Grace Nail Johnson through southern states in 1932. The two of them passed as white patrons at a restaurant in Tennessee, as a political stunt. Her continued political activism eventually led to an event in 1941 in which First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited Grace Nail Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Numa P. G. Adams to the White House to discuss the current state of race politics.

Later during World War II, Johnson publicly resigned from the New York committee of the American Women's Voluntary Services because of racial discrimination she and others experienced in their work projects. She submitted her resignation on February 19, 1942, following the example of other African-American members of the organization. She later wrote to the A.W.V.S. criticizing their unwillingness to state their stance on the involvement of African-Americans in the organization, accusing them of admitting African-Americans to the organization solely to save face.

In addition to being a political activist, Johnson was also part of a network of prominent Harlem women who fostered the development of African-American children's literature. This connection began with the patronage her parents gave to Harlem artists and deepened with her marriage to James Weldon Johnson, a writer himself. Even after her husband's death, Johnson continued to participate in discussion circles of Harlem literature. Of the many literature circles she participated in, one group that focused entirely on children's fiction included herself, Langston Hughes, Ellen Tarry, and Charlemae Hill Rollins. The two encountered each other when they attended the same theater production and discovered that they had similar interests in art and social welfare.

As the Nail family began to experience hard times, James Weldon Johnson's involvement in the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements helped them secure positions within the NAACP. It was partially due to James Weldon Johnson that Grace's father, John Bennett Nail, was named the organization's first "Life Member".

The Johnsons were somewhat unlike other activist members of the Harlem elite in that they also participated in the bohemian social clubs which were prominent in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. Her ashes were buried with her husband's on the Nail family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. She designated Ollie Okala as the executor of her estate. Ollie continued to live in the Harlem apartment she used to share with Grace until her own death on September 9, 2001. As a final testament to their friendship, Okala's ashes were interred in the Nail plot at Greenwood. In 1941, she worked with Carl Van Vechten to create the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. At the time of its creation, the collection was one of the only of its kind. Her own papers, as well as a scrapbook of her brother John E. Nail's work, were later added to the collection. Until her death in 1976, Johnson continued to seek out and receive additional pieces of literature from other Harlem authors to add to the collection. The collection has been a valuable resource for research on Harlem Renaissance literature and history.