Complete Poems

2000 marks the centenary of ＂Lift Every Voice and Sing,＂ James Weldon Johnson’s most famous lyric, which is now embraced as the Negro National Anthem. In celebration, this Penguin original collects all the poems from Johnson’s published works--Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), God’s Trombones (1927), and Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (1935)--along with a number of previously unpublished poems.

Sondra Kathryn Wilson, the foremost authority on Johnson and his work, provides an introduction that sheds light on Johnson’s many achievements and his pioneering contributions to recording and celebrating the African American experience.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. Among the first to break through the barriers segregating his race, he was educated at Atlanta University and at Columbia and was the first black admitted to the Florida bar. He was also, for a time, a songwriter in New York, American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, executive secretary of the NAACP, and professor of creative literature at Fisk University--experiences recorded in his autobiography, Along This Way. Other books by him include Saint Peter Relates an Incident, Black Manhattan, and God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. In addition to his own writing, Johnson was the editor of pioneering anthologies of black American poetry and spirituals. He died in 1938.