by Imani Perry
MAY WE FOREVER STAND
THE JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN SERIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan, editors
MAY WE FOREVER STAND
A History of the Black National Anthem
IMANI PERRY
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
This book was published with the assistance of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.
© 2018 Imani Perry
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed and set in Adobe Text Pro by Rebecca Evans
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover photograph: Carver Negro School chorus singing at the 1957
Florida Folk Festival, White Springs, Florida. Photograph by Jim Stokes, courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Perry, Imani, 1972– author.
Title: May we forever stand : a history of the black national anthem / Imani Perry.
Other titles: John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture.
Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Series: The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037709 | ISBN 9781469638607 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469638614 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Johnson, J. Rosamond (John Rosamond), 1873–1954. Lift every voice and sing. | African Americans—Music—History and criticism. | Anthems—United States—History and criticism. | African Americans—United States—History.
Classification: LCC ML3561.L54 P37 2018 | DDC 782.25089/96073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037709
For my mother, THERESA A. PERRY, who taught me to know and love my people
Contents
Preface
ONE I’ll Make Me a World
Black Formalism at the Nadir
TWO The Sound and Fury of a Renaissance
Art and Activism in the Early Twentieth Century
THREE School Bell Song
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” in the Lives of Children in the Segregated South
FOUR The Bell Tolls for Thee
War, Americana, and the Anthem
FIVE Shall We Overcome?
Music and the Movement
SIX All Power, All Poetry, to the People
From “Negro” to “Black” National Anthem
SEVEN A Piece of the Rock
Post–Civil Rights Losses, Gains, and Remnants
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Cover art from the November 1927 issue of Crisis magazine 53
The Harp sculpture by Augusta Savage commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair 69
Preface
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?
—MAYA ANGELOU
There he was, busily moving about his toys and happily humming.
“Do you know what that song is?” I asked him.
“Yes, it’s the Black National Anthem!”
“Where did you learn it?”
“At school.”
He walked away. I was surprised. My eldest son was then in kindergarten at a predominantly white, mostly upper-middle-class Quaker elementary school. Like many other middle-class black parents I lived with a quiet nervousness about whether my child would grow up to have an adequate appreciation for black culture given his environment. But here he was, singing our precious song.
Even I, thirty-one years older than him, hadn’t learned the song in school. I’d picked it up at countless Martin Luther King Jr. memorial events, at churches, reading Ebony Jr. magazine,1 and in black youth groups. It was in the ether. My academic experience was much like that of my children: flies in rich buttermilk. But in the time between my childhood and theirs, racial dynamics and my family’s trajectory had changed. I was always, to some extent, a guest in the prep school world, much more identified with the red dirt of my birth state of Alabama than my clipped New England speech superficially attested. But my children were something much closer to being “to the manor born.” It hadn’t quite occurred to me just how much I worried about the losses entailed in privilege until I felt jubilant that my son knew “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” His childhood might have passed without it.
Every Thanksgiving we travel to Birmingham, Alabama, to celebrate the holiday with our extended family. Dozens of us gather in the den, huddled close together on a wraparound sofa, a few chairs, and some of us on the floor. That fall when my first born was in kindergarten and my baby was two years old we were grieving the loss of my grandmother. She was my family’s guiding force. Sadness lingered. Spontaneously, I asked my son to share the song he’d been learning in school. He stood and began to sing. Before he finished the first line, everyone in my mother’s generation stood up with him and raised their right arms with solid black power fists. His eyes widened like saucers and mine filled with tears.
I wondered how my grandmother, who was born in 1917, would have responded in that moment. What would she have remembered about the song if she had been there with us in the flesh? Four generations of my family, at least, have lived with this anthem. Each generation, each individual, knows this song in a distinctive manner. We discovered it in our coming of age and in the varied orbits of our lives. I thought of a great aunt of mine whom I never met named Avie Kibble Lovely. Avie served in World War II, against her husband’s wishes, and she collapsed and died while out canvassing for the NAACP in 1963, back when it was both illegal and treated like a seditious organization in Alabama. For years I wished I had known her, but I now know enough to recognize that I stand in her legacy just as I stand in that of my grandmother and the other women and men of that generation and the one before in my family; people to whom I owe not just my existence but my way of being in the world. My ancestors took in laundry and cleaned others peoples’ houses for a pittance, then dragged themselves home to tend to their own. They pushed ploughs, canned vegetables, and hung meat on ceiling hooks in the smokehouse, aproned and exhausted. They sent their children on long walks to one-room schoolhouses to learn and dream, all the while scrubbing floors and picking cotton and serving. They donned their Sunday best to begin each week and loved and lived a grace that those who were white and powerful tried to steal away. This song, that I know, coursed through all the details of their lives that I will never know. It rang through lives out of which I have been made. The words connect them to me, and me to them. In this, I am not alone. The contemporary jazz artist Jason Moran described his decision to record the song to me in this way: “I recorded the song because I was coming out of a focus on the blues. My album Same Mother was about that, and the recording Artist in Residence was mainly a catalog of commissions. So, the song actually didn’t really have a place, but I felt compelled to record it because I thought it connected the materials. On the recording it follows ‘Rain,’ which was a commission centering on the ‘ring shout.’ So, how to connect these songs that reflect our past
and our possibility? Does that make sense? I also like that the song was written for one reason, the assignment on Lincoln, and then 50 years later, the song gains a totally new context. It’s a piece that doesn’t sit still, and in that way, defines it as a brilliant composition.”
In other words, it is our common thread.
By the time my younger son was in kindergarten and also came home singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”2 I had finally committed to writing a history of the song. It came in fits and starts; I put down the project twice, knowing that other smart people had written or were planning to write about it. Those other works are each meaningful in their own way:3 in particular Shana Redmond’s careful consideration of the efforts to use the song as a form of cultural policy in relations with Japan and her brilliant analyses of its compositional features and relationship to other anthems; Timothy Askew’s historical analysis and thoughtful rendering of the political conservativism of the song’s lyricist, poet James Weldon Johnson, and Johnson’s assertions of American patriotism regarding its use; and Keith Cartwright’s captivating account of the diasporic cultural resonances and genealogy of the Johnson brothers, James Weldon and John Rosamond, who wrote the song’s music. All these books are well researched and insightful, and I recommend them eagerly. Particularly useful for my purposes was a collection of memories of the song published by Julian Bond in 2000 in honor of its 100th anniversary. However, upon reading all of these works, I realized that the story I planned to tell hadn’t yet been told. The research completed by the late literary scholar Rudolph Byrd, who also founded the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University, and who wrote introductory essays for the reprints of a number of James Weldon Johnson’s publications, provided a key roadmap for me, especially as he focused on both the details of the poet’s life as well as the context in which he and his brother developed. But the story I have chosen to tell is less concerned with the authors of the song, although they do appear here and there, especially James Weldon Johnson. It is far more a story about the collective embrace of the song as an anthem, as well as the social and cultural history that is revealed by following its trajectory. Only roughly chronological, this story is one of black civic and institutional life and political imaginings under hostile and even captive conditions, with the song woven throughout. Over the course of these pages I discuss the significance of the song in black life over the course of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The reader will also encounter vignettes that show how the song was situated in the midst of varying social and political moments, as well as individual lives. A picture will also emerge of black civic, educational, and political life. Although not comprehensive, it should give a rich picture of the world and people the anthem described.
When I first began telling people what I was doing with this book, more than a few editors and scholars questioned whether I would have enough to write about. But I wasn’t frustrated that so many others didn’t get it. It simply indicated to me how little people understood of the robust history of this song, and the culture in which it was situated. Their doubt fueled my commitment to write this story. Rather than “not enough,” I had too much, over 9,000 documented references, very few of which had ever been discussed in scholarly literature, to pore over in order to write this book. I have tried to organize the story they revealed, and to streamline it by choosing representative examples and stories of how “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was used and embraced throughout the book. This song was part of a wide range of various political, cultural, and social moments and historical currents.
The ways we tell history often make transitions from one period to the next seem permanent and strict. But in truth every moment and movement bleeds with the ink of a previous era. This truth emerged dramatically as I researched the history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It was the epic anthem embraced by black institutions as well as black and multiracial social movements. Although the tides shifted, and ideologies and tactics rose and fell, the anthem kept people afloat. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” moved with social history, but it also always stands as a sign of a particular racial identity and culture. Even as it was embraced by widely divergent political actors, some aspects of its meaning were and are resilient. It tells the singer to see herself or himself as emerging magnificently through struggle. It nurtures an identity rooted in community. It is a song that moves regionally and internationally, yet holds fast to a sense of particular belonging. It has had a remarkable longevity due to both its beauty and its vision. Perhaps most important, it was and is the song of a people, my people. In the following pages I will trace its journey and with it I will trace a story of African American life over 115 years.
MAY WE FOREVER STAND
LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING
Lift every voice and sing,
Till 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 till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning 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 has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till 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 hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast 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.
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (set to music by John Rosamond Johnson)
Chapter One. I’ll Make Me a World
Black Formalism at the Nadir
The beginnings of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” can be found in the lives of its lyricist, James Weldon Johnson, and its composer, John Rosamond Johnson. The building blocks were, of course, their imaginations and intellects. But how they came of age, the social fabric in which they lived, and the culture to which they belonged (and the many others of which they partook) are essential contexts for understanding how and why their song became the anthem of black America.
James was born in 1871, just six years after black Americans, baptized by a horrific war, had begun the transition from the status of chattel to citizens. His brother John, known as Rosamond throughout his life, arrived in 1873. Their early years buzzed with a family, a community, and a people desperately yearning, learning, organizing, and striving for freedom. The Johnson brothers were born to two seekers. Their father, James Johnson, was a freeborn man from Richmond, Virginia, who had traveled to New York as a young adult seeking his fortune. There he met their mother, Helen Louise Dillet, a young Bahamian singer who had immigrated to New York as a girl. Helen’s paternal lineage could be traced back to late eighteenth-century Haiti. Her father, Stephen Dillet, had served as the postmaster of Nassau, making him one of the few black Bahamians with a high-status government job. The Johnson brothers were sons of the black diaspora. Their roots were wide and varied. But they also came of age in a period of black dispersal across the globe, overwhel
mingly under subjugated conditions. As sons of the diaspora, wherever they went and no matter how deeply connected they felt to the land, the laws of the places they inhabited usually denied them full citizenship and full membership. Accordingly, identity and culture, for them and for their peoples from Virginia to Nassau, were things bigger and more amorphous than patriotism or nationalism.
Helen Louise Dillet and James Johnson married in 1864 in the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral of Nassau, an imposing gothic edifice built of smoky gray stone gathered from a local quarry. Although the church dated to 1670, when they married, it had only been designated a cathedral, and Nassau had only been declared a city, three years earlier. Helen and James had left New York a few years prior, together. They feared the rumors that if the South won the Civil War, slavery would be reestablished in New York, and their freedom would be at risk. So they made their way to Helen’s homeland.1
In New York, although slavery had finally been abolished in 1827 after an emancipation process that lasted many decades, black people continued to suffer second-class status. The Bahamas proved little better in this regard. Under the British Crown, it had its own Caribbean predecessor to what would be known as Jim Crow in the United States nearly a century later. Black Bahamians in the mid-nineteenth century had very limited opportunities to be educated and were overwhelmingly excluded from politics and many public places, as well as coerced into exploitative labor conditions. A white oligarchy ruled the chain of small islands.2
After the Civil War ended, the Johnson couple moved again, to Jacksonville, Florida, which like the rest of the South was under the military authority of the Radical Republicans. This meant that despite the legacy of slavery in their midst, there was a sense of possibility that came along with emancipation and the Reconstruction-era promises of civil and legal equality.