By Linda Y. Brown

Over the last 100 years, James Weldon Johnson’s classic song Lift Every Voice and Sing has been published in hymnals. It has been sung in African American churches and schools, at African American banquets, conferences and programs. It has been performed as jazz, R&B and hip-hop.
Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing and his younger brother, Rosamond Johnson, set it to music. The song is often referred to as the “Negro” or “Black” National Anthem, but Johnson called it the “Negro Anthem” because he felt that a country could only have one national song.
Johnson came from a background of social consciousness. His grandfather was a public servant in the House of Assembly in the Bahamas for 30 years, his mother was a teacher and his father owned a fishing business. After the business was destroyed by a hurricane in 1866, the family moved to Jacksonville, Fla. After college Johnson became the principal of Stanton School in Florida where his brother was also a teacher. While at school, Johnson founded the Daily American, a newspaper that highlighted issues relevant to the African American community, with an emphasis on self-reliance. He would also become the first African American admitted to the Florida bar.
Johnson was named U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela in 1906, and U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua in 1909. During the 1920s he worked as field secretary with the NAACP, helping to increase membership from 10,000 to more than 40,000 members. He would later serve as its executive secretary.
Known for his gift for writing poetry, Johnson was asked to write a song for the school choir in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. In his autobiography, Along This Way, Johnson wrote, “I got my first line, ‘Lift every voice and sing,’ not a startling line, but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza there came to me the lines, ‘Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.’ The spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond. In composing the two other stanzas I did not use pen or paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself. Going through all of the agony and ecstasy of creating.”
On Feb.12, 1900, a choir of 500 children performed the song for the first time in public. Over the following years Johnson and his brother went on to have success in other careers and spent their time between Jacksonville and Harlem while they wrote more than 200 Broadway songs. Neither of the brothers thought much more about the song they wrote for the students of Stanton. However, the students kept the song alive and over the next 20 years it continued to gain popularity in the larger community and throughout the Southern states. Eventually the NAACP adopted it as the Negro National Anthem.
“My favorite line in the whole song is ‘Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee,’” said Julian Bond, former NAACP chairman in an interview on National Public Radio. “Now the ‘Thee’ in that is God, but I think the thee in that is also the ‘lest’ we forget the struggle. ‘Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world we forget the struggle.’ So it’s a call to action. It’s a call to struggle. It’s a mobilizing song.”
“I’m a real zealot about that song,” said Rosemary Harris, President of the NAACP in Colorado Springs, Director of Adult Services for the Women’s Resource Agency, and public speaker. “It was probably sometime in elementary school when I first heard it.”
Harris attended an all-Black elementary school in Indiana where Lift Every Voice and Sing was taught in kindergarten music class and sung by the entire student body each morning immediately after prayer and the National Anthem.
“I’m appalled when people don’t know the words to the song, and they don’t seem to have a problem with that,” said Harris, who does not print the words to the song in the programs for special affairs presented by her NAACP chapter. “By now we should know the words. It’s a travesty of legacy. I fear that the song is being pushed to a shelf of history. It is still a living breathing song even 100 years after it was written.”
Harris continued. “We were taught to sing the first two stanzas triumphantly, and were taught to sing the last verse quietly, almost as a prayer,” she said. “‘God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who had 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,’ That’s a prayer. That’s what it means.”
Jessie L. Brown, Pastor of Payne Chapel AME Church in Colorado Springs, has a strong affection for the song.
“It is not a national anthem because we don’t have a nation. It’s the Negro Anthem,” Brown said. “It speaks to everything we are as a people. I noticed that everyone sings the song in full force. When our band (Florida AM&N University) played it, the last verse was played soft. It was a prayer. We sang it all through school. It was part of our lives.”
According to Brown, before 1968 every Black child in Florida, where he and his wife, Chris, are from, learned the words and meaning of the song when they entered school.
“The lyrics of the song are so powerful,” said Chris Brown. “Up until the 60s (before desegregation) you could sing that song every morning [in school].”
Although the song is no longer sung in public schools on a regular basis, it is being kept alive through African American organizations and celebrations.
Last month, Jeleesa McIntosh, a student from the Denver School of the Arts, performed the song in front of a crowd of 5th graders at the Paramount Theater in celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. The celebration is an annual collaboration with the YMCA and Denver Public Schools and Lift Every Voice and Sing is always included as part of the program.
This month Harris will make sure a special emphasis is placed on the meaning of the song during the Founder’s Day celebration of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Colorado Springs on Feb. 25.

Lift Every Voice>>

Editor’s note: Linda Y. Brown recommends Lift Every Voice and Sing, A Pictorial Tribute to the Negro National Anthem, by James Weldon Johnson, published in 2000, as a great book for elementary age students. Lift Every Voice and Sing: 100 Years, 100 Voices, by Julian Bond and Dr. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, is another tribute for older students and adults.