“When Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was penned, the times for Blacks were hard and looked very bleak. Well, things have not changed much. The same form of prejudice is happening today in a very concealed manner. Our children need to know where we came from, where we’re headed, and how they can take the reins and continue to lift every voice and sing.”
James Weldon Johnson, teacher, poet, critic lawyer and diplomat was asked to write a speech for Lincoln’s birthday celebration in Jacksonville, Florida on February 12, 1900. Johnson, one of Jacksonville’s most prominent black citizens, was pleased and decided to write a poem. However, a shortage of time pressured him into looking for something that would be quicker to complete.
“I talked it over with my brother the thought I had in mind,” Johnson writes in his autobiography, “and we planned to write a song to be sung as a part of the exercises. We planned, better still, to have it sung by school children — a chorus of five hundred voices.” Johnson labored over the words and his brother, Rosamond, a published musician, set them to music.
After Lincoln’s birthday program, the authors of the song gave it little or no thought. However, the 500 black school children continued to lift their voices until the words and melody were heard ringing in black homes and churches throughout the South. Children grew up learning that the faith which brought black people through slavery would help them endure until their “new day” dawned victorious over poverty and prejudice.
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing moved North with the many blacks leaving the oppressive South. Nearly one million blacks moved North from 1915 to 1920. They had few material possessions, but love of family and church sustained them as they searched for jobs, educational opportunities, and civil liberties.
In the 1920s, the black church remained the center of the black community and it was there that Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing continued to stimulate, comfort, and guide its listeners. The words of the song urged black people to raise their voices in unity and demand the liberties that had been promised. The words also stressed that the horrors of slavery must never be forgotten. After all, the tears and blood of their forefathers had earned them the right to share in America’s wealth.
In the late 1920s, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson introduced Negro History Week, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing became part of a controversy. A Methodist minister named Ernest Lyon discouraged blacks from singing Lift Ev’ry Voice. He believed that calling it the Negro National Anthem advocated a divided America. Lyon published a pamphlet calling the song and its author subversive. He thought The Star Spangled Banner, written fifty years before the emancipation of blacks, should be the only song with the words “National Anthem” in its title. By this time, Lift Ev’ry Voice had been adopted as the official song of the NAACP, Black America’s first organized civil rights organization.
Throughout the Depression, the popularity of the song persisted. “I have commonly found,” Johnson noted in his autobiography, “printed or typewritten copies of this song pasted in the backs of hymnals and the song books used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A.’s, and similar institutions; and I think that is the method by which it gets its widest circulation.” While Johnson was on the campus of Bryn Mawr College in 1933 to lecture summer students, he was surprised to hear his song being sung by white students. The song and its message kept pace with the times. High unemployment in large urban areas, and farmers losing their farms became a way of life for many people as the 1930s ended.
As the 1940s began, war and rumors of war brought new economic hopes to all Americans with an increase in national defense jobs and military training programs. Yet it took the threat of 106,000 blacks marching on Washington, D.C. in June, 1941 to pressure President Roosevelt into taking steps to guarantee blacks equal opportunities in this new job market. Tensions between blacks and whites were bad. Many black people not only sang Lift Ev’ry Voice, they literally looked for new ways to lift up their voices and spirits to keep up the fight against the racism and civil wrongs which they constantly faced.
Overt racism in the South and covert racism in the North ushered in the 1950s. The black church continued to be the focal point of the civil rights struggle and out of it came strong leaders who forced a change in the American way of living.
A Decade of protest and paradox began in 1960. On one hand, blacks and whites marched together in freedom parades, rode together on freedom rides, cried together as John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets. On the other hand, there was a wave of urban riots, especially in the North. Racism was far from dead.
The 1970s continued along much the same way as the 1960s, full of shadows and differences. It was a period in which white people thought that black people had made enough progress, but blacks pointed to an unemployment rate of 15 percent and realized that they hadn’t come far enough.
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, first introduced by 500 black school children, truly came of age in the 1970s and has remained a classic in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past, this song functioned as a hymn in and around black church affairs. Since the sixties, black children, especially those in northern urban communities, have been exploring the roots of the songs that have meant so much to Black Americans.
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing has been a part of Black American History for over 90 years and it has served the black population well. Its words have stimulated, comforted and guided black people through times of poverty, times of war, and times of struggle. It continues to offer hope and a sense of pride in black heritage. It has truly earned the right to be called a significant document in African-American History.
Dorothy Height and Company
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing has a “universal quality and message,” Dorothy Height, President of the National Council of Negro Women, said over the phone from Washington at the end of January. Ms. Height was instrumental, along with Walter Fauntroy and members of the Black Congressional Caucus, in helping to get the song recognized by Congress. Ms. Melba Moore, membership chair of the annual Black Family Reunion Celebration which Ms. Height established to promote the idea of the unity and survival of the black family, was asked to sing the song a cappella at the beginning of every meeting. This practice was picked up across the nation, and soon almost every official black gathering was paying homage to the Johnson Brothers’ song. Walter Fauntroy, former D.C. Congressman, moved to have the song which he praised for its “eloquence and depth,” entered into the Congressional Record Congressional Record. That was in the fall of 1986, Mr. Fauntroy recalled. “We wanted,” Mr. Fauntroy said recently in his D.C. office, “to commend these words and sentiments to the nation.”
See a PDF of the complete issue of ROUTES from February 3-9, 1992.
See a list of all archived ROUTES editions
