by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
James Weldon Johnson, an NAACP field secretary, civil rights activist, Broadway composer and professor who investigated and spoke out about lynchings in the first decades of the 20th century, also wrote the classic novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, first published in 1912.
But perhaps the publication Weldon is best known for was that of a song he wrote with his brother John Rosamond Johnson. In 1900, in honor of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington as part of a tribute to Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday, they crafted a poem that was read by 500 schoolchildren entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
The poem celebrated freedom as it recognized a brutal past never to be repeated. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was so well received that the brothers set it to music and by 1919 the NAACP dubbed it “the Negro national anthem.” It has functioned in that capacity ever since.
Sung for decades at countless meetings, events, and ceremonies, a 1990 version of the song performed by Melba Moore (which can be heard here on GBN’s “Black Americana” playlist ) was entered into the Congressional Record and, in 2016, into the National Recording Registry.
Singing this song today makes as much sense as any other American anthem, as it is a song of independence from tyranny, inhumanity and injustice. It is sung in honor of Americans who died building this country by progeny who seek to embrace the liberty, hope and prosperity freedom promises.
Enjoy Aretha Franklin, whose voice literally was designated an American natural resource, singing the song we might all lift our voices to sing. Full lyrics published below.
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast
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
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
Our native land
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I’ve known this song as far back as I can remember. My mother used to sing it and said it was the Negro National Anthem. Since I grew up with it I feel a deep emotional connection and it reminds me of my mother.
I grew up singing this song as a child attending racially segregated schools in the South of the 1950s/1960s. As a child, I didn’t understand the significance of the words of this truly God-inspired song. The brilliant Johnson brothers were led by God Himself to write the words and music of the awesome song! It gives me shivers just listening to it and reading the words. Thank you for sharing it!
During the 1960’s , perhaps the most inspiring rendition of this 1920’s anthem was released by an Afro coiffed singer named Kim Weston.whose natural beauty and brave melodic expression presaged so much change that occurred in the sixties and later decades, musically, politically, historically, culturally. A truly unforgettable rallying cry for freedom so profoundly sung it may have stymied the advance of the singer’s career – as too Black.
[…] in the 1920s, Douglas illustrated Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation as well as James Weldon Johnson’s collection of poems, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Douglas established an […]
[…] in the 1920s, Douglas illustrated Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation as well as James Weldon Johnson’s collection of poems, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Douglas established an […]
[…] in the 1920s, Douglas illustrated Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation as well as James Weldon Johnson’s collection of poems, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Douglas established an […]