JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

A competent beginner's biography of James Weldon Johnson -- the black writer of stories, songs and poems who was also a school teacher and principal and, almost incidentally, a lawyer, U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, NAACP staffer, and founder of the first Negro daily newspaper in America. ""The Creation"" from Johnson's God's Trombones is quoted here and the book ends with the words to ""Lift Every Voice and Sing,"" the ""national song"" he wrote with his brother Rosamond. Egypt's telling is conventional from the introductory view of eight-year-old James, at the piano with Rosamond, overhearing his parents express concern for his future, but she makes her subject easy to know about while demonstrating that he is a man worth knowing.