Daoud Tyler-Ameen contributed to the digital version.Anyone who knows Kirk Watson knows his fondness for fast-tracking ideas. Ted Robbins contributed to the broadcast version of this story. But, she told Vogue magazine, "They understood the feeling it gave them." When Beyoncé sang it at Coachella, she knew the mostly white audience didn't know the history of the black national anthem. The reach of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" continues to expand.
"It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change. "It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources," Shana Redmond says. Joseph Lowery gave the benediction at President Barack Obama's first inauguration, and began by quoting the song's third verse nearly verbatim. In 2009, the entire nation heard its words when Civil Rights leader Rev. Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has performed it. It's included in nearly 30 different Christian hymnals, both black and white. The Morgan State University Choir opens every concert with it. The song is now widely performed - at churches, schools, and graduation ceremonies and beyond. "'Lift Every Voice and Sing' became a counterpoint to those types of absences and elisions."Īmerican Anthem 'This Little Light Of Mine' Shines On, A Timeless Tool Of Resistance "The National Anthem, 'The Star Spangled Banner,' was missing something - was missing a radical history of inclusion, was missing an investment in radical visions of the future of equality, of parity," she says. On the other hand, the song that theoretically should link all Americans together, "The Star Spangled Banner," falls short of that goal according to Shana Redmond. We need an anthem that links us all together." "They were saying, 'Well, if we have marched, and we have attained what we hope to be equality, we can't have a black anthem. "There were many African-Americans who were in conflict with that idea," Askew says. "Lift Every Voice and Sing" faded from popularity towards the end of the civil rights movement in favor of songs like "We Shall Overcome." Askew says the song's recognition as a black national anthem is actually one of the reasons it has moved in and out of favor. who wrote to James Weldon Johnson and who said, 'We are singing that song you called the black national anthem.' People in Japan, South America, people around the world, particularly during the '30s and '40s, were singing this song." "Even during days of segregation," Askew says, "there were Southern white churches. But its influence reached well beyond those boundaries, according to Timothy Askew, an English professor at Clark Atlanta University and scholar of the song's history. The song became a rallying cry for black communities, especially in the South. "It spoke to the history of the dark journey of African-Americans," says current NAACP president Derrick Johnson, "and for that matter many Africans in the diaspora struggled through to get to a place of hope." Washington endorsed it, and in 1919, it became the official song of the NAACP. Two key events led to its being named the Negro National Anthem: In 1905, Booker T. Author and activist James Weldon Johnson wrote the words as a poem, which his brother John then set to music. "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was written at a pivotal time, when Jim Crow was replacing slavery and African-Americans were searching for an identity.