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Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Selected Poems

About the Book

This selection of more than forty poems from a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance includes both uncompromising indictments of racial injustice and celebrations of the triumphs of African-Americans.

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.
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Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin Series

The Captain and the Enemy
The Good Apprentice
The Four Feathers
Lift Every Voice and Sing
Finnegans Wake
A Russian Journal
The Enormous Room
Carpenter's Gothic
Selected Letters of Marianne Moore
The Wonderful World of Oz
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About the Author

James Weldon Johnson
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871–1938) was a novelist, poet, lawyer, editor,  ethnomusicologist, and coauthor of the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is informally known as the Black national anthem. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, he was educated at Atlanta University and at Columbia University and was the first Black lawyer 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. His other books include an autobiography, Along This Way and God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. More by James Weldon Johnson
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