by Imani Perry
But the song was situated in a rich mix of performance and mastery. Ralph Ellison’s description of the May Day celebrations of his youth in 1920s Oklahoma presents a striking picture of this cultural milieu:
On May Day children from all the Negro schools were assembled on the playing field of the old Western League baseball stadium, the girls in their white dresses and the boys in blue serge knickers and white shirts, and there to the music of the Douglass High School Band, we competed in wrapping dozens of maypoles and engaged in the mass dancing of a variety of European folk dances . . . in learning such dances we were gaining an appreciation of the backgrounds and cultures of our fellow Americans whose backgrounds lay in Europe. . . . And while there were those who thought that we were stepping out of the role assigned Negroes and were expressing a desire to become white, we ignored them. For we knew that dancing such dances would no more alter our racial identity or social status than would our singing of Bach chorales.
Ellison admires the lesson his teacher imparted through these performances:
Thanks to Mrs. Breaux, we were being introduced to one of the most precious of American freedoms, which is our freedom to broaden our personal culture by absorbing the cultures of others. Even more important was the fact that we were being taught to discover and exercise those elements of freedom which existed unobserved (at least by outsiders) within our state of social and political unfreedom. And this gift, this important bit of equipment for living, came through the efforts of a woman educator who by acting as agent of the broader American culture was able to widen our sense of possibility and raise our aspirations.20
It is also important to note that black formalism doesn’t follow the schema of what critics in the West conventionally describe as high- or low-status identities, nor does it adhere to the traditional Western rules of high and low culture, where rarified and exclusive tastes are deemed “high culture” and popular and relatively simplistic tastes are part of “low culture.” The formalism in black formalism came from the structure of the rituals and the regard for their seriousness, and not whether the work of a classical European composer or a vernacular poet like Paul Laurence Dunbar was part of a given program or event. Ellison goes on to say of the teacher who introduced him to black formalism,
It was Mrs. Breaux who introduced me to the basic discipline required of the artist. And it was she who made it possible for me to grasp the basic compatibility of the classical and vernacular styles which were part of our musical culture. She was one of the owners of what for many years was the only Negro theater in Oklahoma City. . . . In her Aldridge Theater one could see and hear the great blues singers, dancers and comedians, the famous jazz orchestras and such repertory drama groups as the Lafayette players. In other words, just as she taught the Negro spirituals along with Bach and Handel, she provided a cultural nexus in which the vernacular art forms could be encountered along with the classical.21
In this vignette, Ellison captures something important about the order of black formalism and its departure from the conventions of “high” and “low.” Mrs. Breaux’s theater was a community institution, and the education she provided and the formal rituals her students performed as part of it were rich and varied.
By asserting the cross-class and multigenre and style collage of black formalist rituals, I, like Ellison, am disagreeing with a good deal of African American studies criticism. A distinction has sometimes been made by such critics that treats art (or behaviors) deemed vernacular or “folk” as the only truly authentic forms of black expression, while the classical (e.g., European concert music) is simply seen as a mimicry of European cultural forms. That distinction is largely erroneous. Instead, the archive and artistry show something quite different. Hortense Spillers uses the same term “black formalism” to describe black artistic production. Her use is highly related albeit distinct from my own use of the term. Spillers’s black formalism refers to the aesthetics and technical form of black American arts. And according to her, complexity and creolization exist across the board. She thereby refutes a distinction often drawn between “authentic folk” and “imitative classical.” Rather she identifies a “black classical” that is of the folk and voraciously and beautifully creolized. Here, I am describing what could be termed the social corollary to this classical black expression.22 I am referring to rituals and performance, whereas Spillers brilliantly describes artistic content. As Spillers asserts for composition, I am arguing that the rituals of black formalism—that is, social graces and rules of engagement—were not the property of elites. This is evidenced in the range of stories that appear in this book. Formalism was deeply rooted in the communities that black folks imagined and carefully crafted from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century, and that continue in more modest form today. In particular, I’m interested in black formalism as part of the culture attached to institutions like schools, churches, and civic organizations. Appropriately, given the creole forms of black life in the Americas, black formalism included elements of European cultural forms, though in its constitution it became something distinctly black American. For example, performances in black schools or before black civic associations at the turn of the century often included spirituals and black vernacular poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar alongside operatic singing and Western classical music and oratory. This collage of “high” and “low,” Western and African, Southern and European, reflected the matrix of black life in the West. Moreover, the black community forged, by dint of these ritual practices, a means of articulating who they were and aspired to become.
Black formalism, then, was not based upon hierarchical ideas of culture that marked some cultures as more worthy than others. Rather, the distinctions made were about time and place appropriateness. Gutbucket blues and shake dancing were not part of black formalist endeavors. But black language and art of other sorts were. It was not an exercise in asserting cultural superiority or hierarchies, like so much formal culture of the West. Rather it was a ritual engagement in performative, musical, literary, institutional, and social culture with practiced seriousness. It did not compete with vernacular form. It was simply another dimension of the spectrum of cultural life in which most black Americans participated.
Although black formalism was engaged in across the lines of socioeconomic class and education, the increased access to formal education, literacy, and property that emerged in the postbellum period unquestionably aided the development of black formalism. To be able to record the community’s doings, in the form of written language,23 and to own property in which to perform (schools, churches, clubs, homes) was essential to the development of institutions in which exercises of black formalism would take place. After the Civil War southern black Americans created a public culture and institutional life that had previously been denied. In addition to rebuilding family ties and pursuing political participation and literacy, freedpeople sought, passionately and early, to develop their civic life. It is within this vision and effort that formalism grew.
Singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was not simply one aspect of black formalism, it was one of the most fundamental elements of it. Soon after its composition, the song would become a definitive part of ritual practices in schools and churches and civic gatherings. But how? According to James, the song quickly became popular among young people in Jacksonville and spread from there.24 However, neither James nor Rosamond remained in Jacksonville long enough to directly witness that growing popularity. Their departure the year after writing the song was precipitated by a devastating event. In 1901, a fire started in a mattress factory in their neighborhood, LaVilla, and destroyed much of Jacksonville. “We met many people fleeing,” James recounted. “From them we gathered excitedly related snatches: the fiber factory catches afire—the fire department comes—fanned by a light breeze, the fire is traveling directly east and spreading out to the north, over the district where the bulk of Negroes in the western end of the city live—the fireme
n spend all their efforts saving a low row of frame houses just across the street on the south side of the factory, belonging to a white man named Steve Melton.”25
But the fire chief allowed black-owned homes to burn. After a mere eight hours, 10,000 people were homeless and 2,368 buildings were gone. The brothers, undoubtedly heartbroken at the cruelty of Jim Crow and enticed by the hub of opportunity up north, departed for New York. Many other black Jacksonville residents departed in the next couple of years as well, hoping to begin somewhere else anew.26
In New York, James and Rosamond took up work in the musical theater. Almost immediately successful, they collaborated on such hits as “Tell Me, Dusky Maiden” and “Nobody’s Looking but the Owl and the Moon,” for which James wrote the lyrics and Rosamond the music. They also established a prolific partnership with another black musician, Bob Cole. When James dropped out to pursue his careers as an activist and writer, Rosamond and Bob, known as “Johnson and Cole,” continued to write another string of hits.
Those who remained in black Jacksonville after the fire gradually put the pieces of their lives back together. They rebuilt buildings and homes, stung by or raging quietly with the memory of cruel neglect. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song of endurance, lament, and supplication, suited their moment, and the cruelties experienced by so many others in the black world. It resonated deeply with the heartache of second-class citizenship. It’s no surprise, then, that the song also grew in popularity by means of one of the most important black organizations of the period, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW).
The NACW was founded in July 1896, two months after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. It was the product of a merger between two black women’s activist organizations: the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the League of Colored Women. One of its leaders, and a founding member, Victoria Earle Matthews, was a former slave, born in Fort Valley, Georgia. So light-skinned that she could have easily passed for white yet born in bondage, her body and history served as evidence of the blunt instrument of white supremacy. As an adult under the tutelage of journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, Matthews became an antilynching activist and the president of the Woman’s Loyal Union, an organization that compiled data about the status of black people nationwide by sending questionnaires to black ministers, teachers, and other community leaders across the country. Its goal was to correct common misperceptions about the race as well as to aggregate information that could facilitate collective efforts to develop skills and resources among the black population, which remained overwhelmingly poor and subject to aggressive racism. Although club women like Matthews have often been described as elitist and classist by scholars, and that characterization was often warranted, it bears noting that the great majority of them, no matter how elite they were, were just a generation or two from enslaved family members. Very few were totally removed from the condition of “the least of these.” Even those who descended from free people came from a freedom that was so tightly circumscribed by racism that it barely qualified as such. And even the beneficiaries of a color hierarchy, the lightest and often the wealthiest among them, carried for the world to see on their flesh the evidence of how stringent the color line was (they were not to think of themselves as white as long as they were “stained” by blackness). Black Americans grew in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to be a multiracial population, with a phenotypic spectrum as wide as that of the entire globe, in large part because of the routine sexual assault of black women by white men during slavery and Jim Crow. Any room filled with black people, and their many colors, reveals this history. To be elite in this group was a modest privilege at best.
Matthews’s mother, Caroline, had run away from Georgia to New York soon after her daughter was born. Caroline hoped that in New York she would be able to earn enough money to buy the freedom of Victoria and her older daughter. She never was able to make enough to do so. However, after the war, in 1869, Caroline returned to Georgia to find her daughters and reclaim custody by bringing a lawsuit in Georgia state court. She became the first black women to be granted standing before the court and to succeed in a custody case in the state of Georgia, and soon thereafter returned with her daughters to New York.27 Victoria Matthews and her sister were born to an independent and courageous woman, and Victoria followed in her footsteps as a race woman working in the nadir of American race relations.28
In 1901, she wrote an article on the Johnson brothers for Colored American. The placement of this first journalistic appreciation of the song is important. Colored American was the first monthly magazine in the United States devoted to African American culture and was an important publication in the thriving black print culture at the turn of the century. In her piece, Matthews wrote that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was “not only an anthem. It is a revelation leading to and ending in prayer. It is based upon what we as a people have come from, a saddened sense of what we are, and a trembling fear of what we might be, ending in a pain drawn, sob like prayer to God. The music is endearing, it soothes as it inspires. Like the real heart-songs of our mothers it affects the singer as deeply as the listener, by a certain weirdly plaintive melody that lingers and lingers, like a subdued memory picture, long after the sounds have rolled away. From the beginning to the end, words and music blend in tender pathos.”29
That Matthews, one of the most prominent black thinkers and activists of the turn of the century, referred to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as an anthem merely a year after it was written foreshadowed its future impact. Matthews went on to say, “James W. Johnson, known best as the author of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ is the elder. He is very quiet, almost grave, just the opposite extreme to his brother Rosamond, the composer. . . . If he had done no more than produce the music of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ he would have endeared himself to us all.”
In the following decade and a half, the historical record shows the slow but steady proliferation of “Lift Every Voice” in various segments of black life and culture. In 1903, it concluded the Emancipation Day program of the Negro Literary and History Society of Atlanta, held at Ebenezer Baptist Church.30 The ceremony celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Emancipation Day was an annual holiday in black America, although it was held on varying dates depending upon when freedom was granted or first heard about by the formerly enslaved in that particular state. Like the early nineteenth-century freedom celebrations of black communities in the North, this postbellum southern holiday provided a ritual occasion for the recall of history, the celebration of freedom, and the assertion of identity.31 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Emancipation Day became one of the most important black formalist occasions in African American communities, and singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a ritualistic part of the celebration. By 1905, “Lift Every Voice” was also being sung as part of graduation programs, as was the case for the Douglass Colored High School (named after Frederick Douglass) in El Paso, Texas, where the hymn opened the May 6 commencement.32 The program also included an instrumental of Franz von Suppé’s “Overture to Poet and Peasant,” and the chorus singing Eben H. Bailey’s march “On the Move.” The formalism of the event thus included both European and African American music. The von Suppé selection, which is a musical love story featuring a peasant youth who, notwithstanding his low social status, has exceptional literary gifts that attract the adoration of the young woman he loves, along with the robust hopefulness of Bailey’s march and the newly beloved Johnson brothers’ anthem, together proffer a portrait of a ritual intended to foster resilience, struggle, and greater attainment out in the world. Formalism was functional. It nourished the spirit and bolstered future endeavors.
For these reasons, and more, club women circulated the song and encouraged their communities to embrace it. The NACW published the lyrics in its newsletter National Notes a number of times and sang it at t
he gatherings of both the state organizations and the national organization in the early years of the twentieth century.
The women who belonged to the NACW were highly influential in black communities. They were members of a thick and developing network of black associational life. They were teachers, social workers, church matrons, community activists, and civic association members as well as mothers, daughters, wives, aunts, and cousins. That Matthews, along with the rest of her colleagues in the NACW, asserted the sanctity of this anthem ensured that it would become fully ensconced in black life. When they chose it, black America writ large was choosing it as well. Further evidence of this choice is found in how the song circulated throughout black print culture. The lyrics were published in newspapers as various as Lutheran Women’s Work; the Topeka Plain Dealer; and the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Crisis.
As an anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was easy to embrace. It is an enchanting composition. Contemporary critic Keith Cartwright writes that “its patriotism and piety can seem utterly conventional. There is however, in ‘Lift Every Voice’ a yearning for integration of sacral inheritances that does not reduce to paths of assimilation into Anglo-American national norms. For the God and native land of this countercultural anthem of modernity differ from the God and native land of the republic’s imaginary. . . . It seeks to produce a utopian space of nativity in the congregational labor of lifting voice and moving beyond fixed boundaries.”33
Cartwright interprets the song’s patriotism as not belonging to the United States. Rather, he sees it as a patriotism that belonged to an alternative imagined community, one built of the stuff of black experience here on these shores but reaching for something or somewhere else where freedom would be truly possible. He describes the song as one of contemplation and meditation upon the theme of freedom. Musically, as well as linguistically, the repetitions and the way the composition plays with time make it feel like a meditation upon a theme. And while it is emotionally uplifting, it is also challenging. Remembering her many years of playing the song as part of a children’s band in the mid-twentieth century, Evelyn Fairbanks wrote, “The official Negro national anthem was requested the most. . . . The song has everything for a musician. It’s full bodied, with important parts for all the instruments. The rhythm and tempo are varied, the shading and phrasing are intricate, the figuring is difficult, requiring the purest tones, and you never quite get it right. Nothing pleases musicians more than finding music that constantly presses them to play better the next time.”34 What the Johnson brothers did was both complex and effective. James’s lyrics borrowed elements from political, classical, and liturgical prose and music. British writer Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional” was one direct influence. Kipling wrote “Recessional” in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. When preparing for the occasion, at first he wrote an ode to imperialism titled “White Man’s Burden,” but he decided to set that aside (he would pick it up again two years later) and wrote “Recessional” instead. Like “Lift Every Voice,” “Recessional” is hymn-like. It celebrates the glories of empire but anticipates its tragic demise. (“White Man’s Burden,” in contrast, is a more joyful and destructive poem, imagining the United States as picking up the responsibility of empire and white supremacy as the British Empire declined.) “Recessional” reads as follows: