Five Acres, Still Singing: The James Weldon Johnson Foundation on Black Preservation Stories
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
What does it mean to preserve not just a building, but a tradition? That question sits at the center of a recent episode of "Black Preservation Stories," the podcast of the Black Grassroots Heritage Preservation Network, which features Foundation Chair and Treasurer Jill Rosenberg Jones and President Rufus E. Jones Jr. in an extended conversation about Five Acres, the restoration of James Weldon Johnson's writing cabin, and the ongoing work of the James Weldon Johnson Foundation.
"Black Preservation Stories" is now in its second season. The podcast, produced by the Black Grassroots Heritage Preservation Network, documents the work of Black individuals, groups, and communities across the country dedicated to preserving and celebrating their heritage. Previous episodes have featured the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, the Robbins House in Concord, Massachusetts, and the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Community Trust in Nassau County, Florida, among others. Each episode centers a specific site or organization and the people behind the work of keeping Black history alive for future generations.
Season 2, Episode 6, titled "Five Acres, Still Singing," focuses on the James Weldon Johnson Foundation and the property at the heart of its mission. Five Acres in Great Barrington, Massachusetts served as Johnson's primary writing retreat from the late 1920s until his death in 1938. It was there that he completed some of his most significant work, including his autobiography Along This Way. The writing cabin on the property, designed in 1926 with the assistance of Berkshire architect and MIT graduate Joseph Arthur Vance, is among a small number of surviving structures purpose-built for Black creative work in an era of systemic racial exclusion. After Johnson's death, the property was sold in the early 1940s. When Jill Rosenberg-Jones and Rufus E. Jones Jr. acquired it decades later, significant repairs were needed, and there had been concern that a new owner might tear it down.
The episode traces how Jill Rosenberg Jones, Johnson's literary executor, discovered the deteriorating property in 2011 and, together with her husband Rufus E. Jones Jr., acquired and restored it. What began as an act of preservation became the foundation for something larger. In 2017, the Foundation launched an artist residency program inspired by Johnson's own conviction that no people can be deemed inferior who produce great art and literature. The residency has since supported artists working across disciplines, from film and documentary to visual art, poetry, and performance.
The conversation with the podcast host ranges across the full scope of what preservation means in practice: the physical work of restoring a historic structure, the institutional work of building a foundation, and the deeper question of what it means to steward a legacy that belongs not only to a family but to a culture. Jill and Rufus discuss rest as resistance, the contested public memory surrounding the National Hymn, and their vision for a future Center for Culture and Convening that would expand Five Acres into a national space for Black artistic and scholarly renewal.
Johnson, poet, novelist, diplomat, lawyer, lyricist, and civil rights leader, has long occupied a place in American history disproportionately small relative to his achievement. The work being done at Five Acres, and the conversations it is generating, are part of what is changing that.
"Five Acres, Still Singing" is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Podbean. Follow the link here to listen: