Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”īut the song is not without controversy. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, My brother and I, in talking, have often marveled at the results that have followed what we considered an incidental effort…we wrote better than we knew.”įelt in the days when hope unborn had died Ĭome to the place for which our fathers sighed? I am lifted up on their voices, and I am also carried back and enabled to live through again the exquisite emotions I felt at the birth of the song. “I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children. “Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being part creator of this song,” Johnson wrote in his 1933 autobiography. “It was so deeply cherished that it was embraced by people with dramatically different political philosophies: integrationists and black nationalists, as well as patriots and radical leftists.” “It was literally a part of the daily or weekly practice of African Americans, particularly those in the South,” Perry told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” didn’t officially become America’s national anthem until 1931. 19, she writes that based on the records of black schools, civic and political institutions, as well as memoirs, oral histories, literature, newspapers and theater, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was used much more broadly than most anthems. In Perry's forthcoming book, " May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem," which comes out on Feb. Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926, the song became a staple of the celebration that would eventually become Black History Month. Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, said black educators in the ’20s and ’30s wrote curricula based on the song. Soon, as the song’s lyrics and music were pasted on the backs of hymnals and Sunday school songbooks across the South, church and HBCU choirs started singing it.Īs early as 1920 - after the NAACP adopted it as its official song - people were referring to it as the “Negro National Anthem.” “I could not keep back the tears,” Johnson wrote about the performance. 12, 1900, 500 schoolchildren performed it for the first time. His younger brother John Rosamond Johnson set the poem to music and on Feb. Noelle Morrissette, the author of "James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes," and the editor of two other books on Johnson's life, said Johnson was originally invited to speak at the event but felt a more lyrical inspiration that became the song. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” (sometimes written as “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”) was created as a poem in 1900 by writer and activist James Weldon Johnson for a program in Jacksonville, Florida, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. I feel an intense bond and a divine connection with voices present, past and future.” When the music begins, and people stand together to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” I experience both sadness and happiness. “This song is also about love for our country and each other. “Singing to God was an opportunity for African-Americans to share a proud history and hopeful perspective,” said Karen Lowery, daughter of civil rights icon Joseph Lowery and director of music and arts at Cascade United Methodist Church. So powerful is the song that it is often referred to as the “Black National Anthem,” although its composer referred to it simply as a hymn. Martin Luther King Jr.Composed more than a century ago, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” came along after Reconstruction, when a newly awakened black race was searching for an identity - just as Jim Crow was replacing slavery. In 2010, the dynamic duo of Trecina Atkins-Campbell and Erica Campbell recorded a rendition of the powerful ballad - also known as the “Black National Anthem” - alongside fellow gospel singer Smokie Norful for the compilation album A Dream Realized: A Gospel Tribute to Dr. Grammy-winning gospel sister duo Mary Mary will perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ahead of the 2022 Super Bowl on Sunday.
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