“Lift Every Voice and Sing”

“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the rousing hymn that would eventually become known as the “Negro National Anthem,” “Negro National Hymn,” and “Black National Anthem,” remains an immensely popular song over a century after its composition. Regularly performed at church services, large community events, formal gatherings, and black graduation ceremonies across the United States, and often sung after the U.S. national anthem (“The Star-Spangled Banner”), the enduring hymn became the official song of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Its stirring lyrics urge the listener to remember the trials and sacrifices of the “dark past,” the perseverance of the ancestors, the progress of African Americans today (“A song full of hope that the [Page 1350]present has brought us”), and the victories yet to come (“Let us march on till victory is won”).

Originally written as a poem at the turn of the 20th century by attorney, journalist, educator, principal, early civil rights activist, songwriter, and author James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), with the musical score written by his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954), who studied music composition at the New England Conservatory, the song remains a celebration of racial uplift. Together, the brothers would compose over 200 songs for musical theater.

James Weldon Johnson, whose philosophy of racial advancement through self-education and hard work in the face of racism most closely aligned with Booker T. Washington, as opposed to W. E. B. Du Bois, worked a number of public-serving jobs, including principal of the Stanton School at age 23, founder of an African American newspaper highlighting racial issues called the Daily American, U.S. consul to Venezuela (1906) and Nicaragua (1909), and field secretary and later general secretary of the NAACP.

Matriculated at Atlanta University, he later studied law under a prominent Jacksonville attorney and was admitted to the Florida Bar Association in 1897, the first African American to do so since Reconstruction. His professional activities alternated between political activism and creative writing, often with overlap between the two.

Johnson enjoyed a prolific career before his life was cut short by a train accident. He wrote his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), served as editor of the influential poetry anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), compiled and edited with his brother The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), wrote his own anthology of poems titled God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and wrote his work of prose titled Black Manhattan (1930), to name a few selected works.