Do Lord Remember Me

An elderly black evangelist recounts his life story, from slavery through segregation and the civil rights movement to the present in this classic novel.

“This is an important book. It tells the truth and tells it eloquently. It is gentle poetry and biting prose. I love this book. I love Julius Lester.” —Maya Angelou

In a gray fieldstone house in Nashville, Tennessee, the Reverend Joshua Smith Sr.—the staunch and gentle man known to thousands in black churches throughout the South as the Singing Evangelist and to one white reporter as “the Colored Billy Graham”—is trying to compose his own obituary on what will be the last day of his life. In doing so, he looks back over that life—from his childhood in rural northern Mississippi to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, from tears of humiliation to songs of celebration and triumph.

When Do Lord Remember was first published in 1984, the Chicago Sun-Times compared it to Alex Haley’s Roots, Newsday described it as “exquisitely crafted,” People as “distinguished,” the Philadelphia Inquirer as “riveting,” and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer declared “every page has something worth remembering.” Twenty years later and now a classic, Do Lord Remember Me is an eloquent and deeply moving story about a black family's dignified struggle for survival.

“Anyone unaffected by Do Lord Remember Me has got to have a lump of granite for a heart.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“An intense and passionate story of family, politics and religion.” —Ebony

“Lester forces us to feel the texture of the South as it must have felt to Smith himself—and to relish a voice at once lamentational, cautionary and joyous.” —Boston Sunday Globe