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By Christine Weerts
Special to the Selma Times Journal

This year marks the 125th anniversary of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the soul-stirring anthem that has captured hearts of millions, won acclaim from top artists, earned designation by the NAACP as the national anthem, and been printed in hymnals of over 48 religious denominations.

The striking hymn with its soaring melodies and deeply moving words was first sung by 500 African-American school children on February 12, 1900, for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in Jacksonville, Florida.

It has been an important anthem resonating with emotion and reverence in Selma churches, the community and civil rights activities for decades, according to City Council President Warren “Billy” Young.

“I have been singing Lift Every Voice and Sing my entire life and every time I sing this anthem I am immediately connected to my past and to my ancestors. In my home, we were required to learn the lyrics by heart. The title of the song requires all who sing it to lift their voices and sing to the heavens,” said the song leader and deacon at First Baptist Church, MLK. “The words in the song reflect my ancestors trials and tribulations but also, a commitment to remain vigilant, resilient, and hopeful.

“When hearing and singing this song, I can feel every word and I can feel the hearts of forefathers and foremothers that were committed to a better life for all people. The song makes me feel proud of my heritage and makes me feel I must continue to fight for liberty for all and let my voice resound loud as a rolling sea.”

The hymn was written by Jacksonville natives, brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, for the highly regarded (segregated) Edwin M. Stanton School, the city’s first public high school for Black students, where James was principal and J. Rosamond, a musician at Bethel Baptist, taught music. Just in their 20s, at the start of what would be remarkably accomplished lives, the Johnsons wanted a special song for the Great Emancipator’s birthday, which featured renown guest speaker, Booker T Washington, of Tuskegee Institute.

James W. Johnson, who wrote the text, said years later that writing the song -with its deeply evocative text had brought him to tears, yet he and his brother forgot about the song after leaving the South for New York a year later.

But the children who sang the song didn’t forget, nor did their teachers. The song took on a life of its own as those young singers took the hymn with them to schools and churches throughout the South, as Johnson noted in his autobiography:

“My brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York [in 1901], and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country.”

Although music publishers reissued the piece several times, Johnson said they most often found it typed or handwritten and pasted into the back of hymnals and songbooks used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A.’s, and similar institutions.

“I think that this is the method by which it gets its widest circulation,” he wrote.

While never mentioning race, the song resonated with the lived experience of Blacks, especially
during the highly segregated and dangerous years of Jim Crow in the deep South. The song describes hope of freedom while not glossing over the deep trials and struggles of African Americans.

“The song proved to be, both then and soon after, much bigger than an ode to any one leader or icon,” wrote Imani Perry in her book, May We Forever Stand. “It was a lament and encomium to the story and struggle of black people. The Johnsons at once wrote black history and wrote black people into the traditions of Western music with their noble song.”

Booker T. Washington, among the first to hear it in 1900, endorsed it five years later and in 1919, the NAACP adopted it as the Black national anthem. Civil Rights hero Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King, said he used the hymn in worship services for 25 years.

“It had historicity; it had the religious context,” said Lowery. “The black experience is sort of wrapped up in that hymn.”

In a review of another book on the hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, Robert Fleming writes about the reaction of some prominent African Americans to the anthem.

“Historian John Hope Franklin reminisces about his days as a young Fisk University student when he heard James Weldon Johnson dramatically recite the song’s lyrics during one of his lectures. Poet Maya Angelou tells how the residents of her impoverished hometown of Stamps, Arkansas, would cry when singing the song, thinking of what opportunities time could bring for their children. Entertainer Harry Belafonte praises the song’s “dual message of the dark past of slavery and hope.” Former U.S. Senator Ed Brooke remembers how the song revived the sagging spirits of the enlisted men and officers of the segregated Negro 366th Infantry Combat regiment fighting in Italy during the Second World War.”

After their songwriting in Jacksonville, the Johnsons, who grew up bilingual, collaborated on several projects, including Broadway show tunes, and the publication of two seminal books on African American Spirituals.

But they also established their own paths forward. A child piano prodigy, Rosamond launched a career in show business, performing and composing Broadway hits and becoming an internationally acclaimed theatrical performer, composer, and producer of some of the earliest musical comedies by African Americans.

James W. Johnson developed a diverse and demanding career, as expected from the former high school principal, who at the same time he expanded the school, published an afternoon newspaper, and taught himself law, becoming the first African American to pass the Florida bar since Reconstruction

In 1906, he was appointed U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua by President Teddy Roosevelt. In 1920, he was named the first Black president of the NAACP. Later, he returned to teaching becoming the first African American professor hired at New York University. He also taught writing at HBCU Fisk University. He published anthologies of Black poets, and wrote poems and his autobiography.

The song still reverberated in his life and in his memories. In his 1933 autobiography, he recalled with clarity the composition of the now famous hymn.

“I got my first line: Lift ev’ry 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 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 other two stanzas I did not use pen and 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…I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment – that sense of serene joy – which makes artistic creation the most complete of all human experiences.”

As Johnson reflected on his long and distinguished career, he found that the song composed with his brother in 1900 meant the most.

“The lines of this song repay me in elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children,” he wrote in 1935. “Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being part creator of this song.”

“Lift Every Voice and Sing”

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 faith that the dark past has taught us,
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.

Stony the road we trod, 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 over a way that with tears has been watered,
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 weary years, 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,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand.
True to our God, True to our native land.