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Source: bbc.co.uk
The 1900 song – originally written as a tribute to former US President Abraham Lincoln – has endured to become the US black national anthem and a powerful symbol, writes Juan Benn Jr.
Twice a day, the air surrounding Howard University’s Washington, DC campus rings with a freedom song.
Tucked away on a hilltop, removed from DC’s busy streets, sits Founders Library – an academic landmark home to the world’s largest archive of records on the black experience. Around lunchtime, the melody of alma mater of the historically black college and university (HBCU) clangs from the library’s bell tower. And if you stick around long enough, the twinkling and hopeful chimes of another tune follow: instantly recognisable to many as the US black national anthem.
Playing the song is a new tradition on the school’s campus; it only became possible in recent years after the bell received upgrades to its system. However, the song, officially titled Lift Every Voice and Sing, has possessed the hearts of black people around the globe for over a century, speaking to the enduring faith and resilience of black Americans against racial oppression in the United States.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing is a hopeful song, but the wounds of American chattel slavery were still fresh when it was written”
When he wrote it in 1900, the scholar and poet James Weldon Johnson did not set out to create a cultural phenomenon. That year, a group of men in Jacksonville, Florida wanted to honour former US President Abraham Lincoln with a birthday celebration. Johnson’s contribution was a poem he asked his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, to write the accompanying score. When it was complete, James taught the song’s lyrics to a choir of 500 black children, all students at the segregated school he was the principal of at the time. On the day of the event, the brothers brought printed copies of the words to share with the community so others could sing along. “The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish,” wrote James in an excerpt from a 1935 collection of poems.
The scholar and poet James Weldon Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing as a birthday tribute to honour former US President Abraham Lincoln (Credit: Alamy)
By 1900, many of the efforts to rebuild the country more equitably than before the US Civil War were crumbling, and Jim Crow policies started to appear across the South. Lift Every Voice and Sing is a hopeful song, but the wounds of American chattel slavery were still fresh when it was written. Johnson’s lyrics reference this history and explore imagery from the time (“Stony the road we trod/Bitter the chastening rod.”) And while it is anthemic in nature, the song is also reminiscent of the spirituals enslaved Africans sung to get them through the toil of the fields (“God of our weary years/God of our silent tears/Thou who has brought us thus far on the way/Thou who has by Thy might/Led us into the light/Keep us forever in the path, we pray.”) In addition, the song declares that descendants of American chattel slavery are members of the country, too (“Shadowed beneath Thy hand/May we forever stand/True to our God/True to our native land.”)
An enduring message
After Lincoln’s birthday party, the Johnson brothers moved away from Jacksonville, Florida to Harlem, NY. They found themselves at the convergence of African-American art, literature and music, known as the Harlem Renaissance, which was emerging just as James believed the song he wrote back home to be fizzling out. “But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it,” he wrote. “They went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country.”
The song speaks to the enduring faith and resilience of black Americans against racial oppression in the United States (Credit: Library of Congress)
Lift Every Voice and Sing reached all corners of the nation and beyond. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) declared the song the “Negro National Anthem” in 1919, one year before James was chosen as the organisation’s first black executive secretary and 12 years before the Star-Spangled Banner was adopted as the US national anthem.
Over the years, Lift Every Voice and Sing has been covered and remixed by artists such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Beyoncé. Most recently, Emmy-award-winning actress, Sheryl Lee Ralph sang the anthem at the Super Bowl this year, a move some found controversial after the National Football League’s (NFL) treatment of Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who was fired after taking a knee during the Star Bangled Banner in protest of police brutality.
Though it might not have been his goal, Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing has become an anthem of hope for not only African Americans but marginalised people around the world. Its message endures, and will continue to live on for as long as we sing, and the clock strikes twelve.
