Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln's birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercise. 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.

Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved from Jacksonville to New York, 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. Today, the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.

The lines of this song repay me in elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.

--James Weldon Johnson, 1935

Pasted into Bibles, schoolbooks, and hearts, Lift Every Voice and Sing, written by J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson in 1900, has become one of the most beloved songs in the African American community--taught for years in schools, churches, and civic organizations. Adopted by the NAACP as its official song in the 1920s and sung throughout the civil rights movement, it is still heard today at gatherings across America.

James Weldon Johnson's lyrics pay homage to a history of struggle but never waver from a sense of optimism for the future--facing the rising sun of our new day begun, let us march on till victory is won. Its message of hope and strength has made Lift Every Voice and Sing a source of inspiration for generations.

In celebration of the song's centennial, Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson have collected one hundred essays by artists, educators, politicians, and activists reflecting on their personal experiences with the song. Also featuring photos from historical archives, Lift Every Voice and Sing is a moving illustration of the African American experience in the past century.

With contributors including John Hope Franklin, Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, Norman Lear, Maxine Waters, and Percy Sutton, this volume is a personal tribute to the enduring power of an anthem. Lift Every Voice and Sing has touched the hearts of many who have heard it because its true aim, as Harry Belafonte explains, isn't just to show life as it is but to show life as it should be.

Commemorating the centennial of James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which became the Negro national anthem and its meaning to African Americans, this evocative compilation of essays features contributions by Maya Angelou, Bill and Camille Cosby, Colin Powell, Norman Lear, Denzel Washington, George and Barbara Bush, and others. notables. 50,000 first printing.

It is wondrous and hardly explicable to many how James Weldon Johnson could have written such spiritually enriching lyrics in 1900 despite the restraints ordained by Jim Crow laws, despite frenzied lynchings and mob violence, despite the fact that white America had established an educational system teeming with stereotypes that had misrepresented and malformed virtually every external view of African American life. Underpinning these sweeping injustices was the Supreme Court's ruling in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case four years before Lift Every Voice and Sing was written in 1900. This decision meant that state laws requiring separate but equal facilities for African Americans were a reasonable use of state powers. Further, The object of the Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the laws, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based

Julian Bond was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was elected in 1965 to the Georgia House of Representatives. He is currently chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Sondra Kathryn Wilson, executor of James Weldon Johnson's literary properties, is an associate of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. Her publications include The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, vols. 1 and 2, The Crisis Reader, The Opportunity Reader, The Messenger Reader, and The Complete Poetry of James Weldon Johnson. She lives in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.