ul low note, then steadily rises in rhythm, spanning the pain and promise of Black history, picking up pace in the stanzas until its final crescendo. The song’s opening words have long been a source of inspiration and comfort to African Americans:
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
On Thursday night in Kansas City, the National Football League featured a live performance of “Lift Every Voice” by Alicia Keys before its season-opening games, a display prompted by the police brutality and racial justice protests that have swept the country after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The league’s decision to play “Lift Every Voice” exposed millions of Americans to the song for the first time.
Most Americans support athletes speaking out, say anthem protests are appropriate, Post poll finds
The song, known as the Black national anthem, was played more than 20 minutes before “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was written by slaveholder Francis Scott Key and includes lyrics about the capture of escaped slaves who fought for the British during the War of 1812.
“Playing the Black national anthem is wonderful to acknowledge what Black people have been through in this country, but that doesn’t negate the racist authorship of the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ ” said CeLillianne Green, a historian, poet, lawyer and author of the book “A Bridge: The Poetic Primer on African and African American Experiences.” “Most people don’t know what the second and third stanzas say in the national anthem and that Francis Scott Key was outraged by Black people fighting for their freedom. They hide those stanzas.”
“Lift Every Voice” was composed as poem in 1899 by novelist, poet and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson when he was principal of a Black high school in the segregated city of Jacksonville, Fla., according to the Library of Congress. His brother John Rosamond Johnson — who had trained in musical conservatories in London and Boston — composed music for the poem.
The song, according to James Weldon Johnson, was first performed by his students. “A group of young men in Jacksonville, Fla., arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900,” Johnson explained. “My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.”
Soon after that first performance, the Johnson brothers moved to New York and almost forgot about the song. But “Lift Every Voice” seemed to take on a life of its own.
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“The school children of Jacksonville kept singing it,” Johnson said. “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.”
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