Songs of My People, by Charles Bertram Johnson (1880 – 1958)

Charles Bertram Johnson was an African American poet born in Callao, Macon County, Missouri. He attended a one-room school and was introduced to Shakespeare, Bacon, and the art of poetry. He attended college in Macon, becoming a teacher and later a minister. Deeply moving , interpretive, and lyrical, his poetry collection has been made part of the public domain, deemed by scholars to be culturally important enough to be “preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public.”