Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift Every Voice and Sing, hymn composed by the American writer and activist James Weldon Johnson and his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson. Since it was first performed in 1900, it has come to be widely regarded as the Black American national anthem. Drawing on the tradition of Black spirituals, it invokes biblical imagery to describe ongoing struggles for freedom. It has been recorded by many famous performers, including Ray Charles and Beyoncé. Since the protests following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, while he was in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020, the song has seen a resurgence in popularity and has often been performed at national sporting events.

Background

At the turn of the 20th century, James Weldon Johnson was living in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, and working as the principal of the Black grammar school from which he had graduated more than a decade earlier. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson, roughly two years his junior, had also returned to Jacksonville, after studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. The brothers had collaborated on an opera that they had sought to have produced on Broadway in 1899. Their ambition was to wed Black folk culture with elements of European music and poetry, bringing “a higher degree of artistry to Negro songs,” the elder Johnson later wrote.

In early 1900 Johnson set out to write a song for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, to be performed by a chorus of 500 students from his school. By the time he had finished the first stanza, he felt imbued with inspiration, and, by the end of the process, he was in tears. “I knew that in the stanza the American Negro was, historically and spiritually, immanent,” he wrote in his 1935 autobiography. His brother set the lyrics to music, and the resulting song was performed at the ceremony that February.

Lyrics

The backdrop for the song’s creation was the unfolding of the Jim Crow era—a time when disfranchisement measures and racial segregation laws were taking hold throughout the South, and lynchings were becoming increasingly common. Though Johnson’s family was part of Jacksonville’s Black middle class, he had witnessed firsthand some of the worst effects of slavery’s aftermath when he taught school in poor rural counties in Georgia.

In the lyrics, he was likely trying to “cultivate a sense of history among his race,” wrote Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson in the 2000 book that they edited celebrating the song’s legacy, Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem: 100 Years, 100 Voices:

“On the one hand, the lyrics reveal how African Americans were estranged from their cultural past by the impact of racial oppression and that they manifested the psychological and physical scars inflicted by that injustice. On the other hand, the song is irrefutably one of the most stalwart and inspiring symbols in American civil rights history.”

In the way it aimed to foster a sense of a national Black identity and to create high art out of African American folk material, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” also prefigured the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, in which Johnson would play a central role.

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Legacy

Johnson moved to New York City two years after he and his brother had composed the hymn, and for years they seldom thought about it. Nevertheless it spread quickly on its own. As early as 1901, it was described in the Black press as an “anthem,” and by 1905 it was being performed at graduation ceremonies.

Johnson became a field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1916, and in 1919—the year before he was chosen to lead the organization—the group made “Lift Every Voice and Sing” its official song. More and more, it became a staple of Black social life. The poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka, for instance, recalled that when he was a child, in the 1930s and ’40s, he expected to hear it at dances, conventions, meetings, and other events to which his parents took him. It gave him the feeling of belonging to a larger community, instilling the sense “that we black folks were actually real and had desires independent of the lunacy of the vicious racist white folks I was told about every few evenings at the dinner table,” he wrote as an adult.

Since the early 1960s, the song’s popularity has waxed and waned, as the scholar Imani Perry charts in her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). It was eclipsed during the civil rights era by “We Shall Overcome,” only to get a rebirth amid the Black Power movement. In 2011 the author Touré called for “a new black national anthem,” nominating Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” but in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, many people have rallied again around “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The National Football League and the National Basketball Association have featured it in pregame ceremonies, and in 2021 Rep. Jim Clyburn, then House majority whip, sponsored legislation to enshrine it as the United States’ “national hymn.”