Lift Every Voice and Sing
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Singing this song quickly became a way for African Americans to demonstrate their patriotism and hope for the future. In calling for earth and heaven to "ring with the harmonies of Liberty," they could subtly speak out against racism and Jim Crow laws — and especially the huge number of lynchings that were accompanying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan at the turn of the century. In 1919, the NAACP adopted the song as "the Negro National Anthem." By the 1920s, copies of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be found in black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals.
During and after the Civil rights movement, the song experienced a rebirth, and by the 1970s it was often sung immediately after the Star Spangled Banner at public events and performances in cities and towns across the United States with a significant African-American population.
The verse most commonly heard is the first verse:
- Lift ev'ry voice and sing,
- 'Til earth and heaven ring,
- Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
- Let our rejoicing rise
- High as the list'ning 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 'til 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 have been watered,
- We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
- Out from the gloomy past,
- 'Til 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
See also: James Weldon Johnson
External links
- Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem (http://www.bookpage.com/0011bp/nonfiction/lift_every_voice_and_sing.html), edited by Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson
- NPR's Performance Today page on Black History Month (http://www.npr.org/programs/pt/features/bhm2003.html) -- includes a link to a Real Player version of the song.