"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", by James Weldon Johnson, examines the relationship between race and class in America
during the early 1900s. The
narrator, a light-skinned man belonging to both the black and white races, finds conflict in his search for identity and meaning within the American consciousness. This paper shows that the narrator's tragic position as a mulatto in America is found in a literary class seen in the autobiographies of authors like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.