Some of life’s events are forever etched in memory. Such an event was a dramatic reading that I heard forty-nine years ago now, during my senior year at college. At the heart of the performer’s dramatic reading was James Weldon Johnson’s “God’s Trombone’s: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.”
The poems are Johnson’s tribute to the itinerant Black preachers who traveled the back roads of the south during the turn of the last century, preaching the gospel with an imagery so vivid and so ...
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