by Imani Perry
God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Like Kipling, James stated this was not his first effort. He began by trying to compose for Lincoln just as Kipling tried to compose for the queen, but then was moved in another direction, away from simple celebration and toward telling and making a people’s history.
In style, it is also immediately apparent that James borrowed from Kipling’s work. He repeats many of Kipling’s short phrases and words: “God of our,” “Drunk with the,” and “lest we forget.” Johnson also adopts some of Kipling’s concepts: a shared caution, sense of inheritance, legacy, and faith as responsibility and not mere endurance. Kipling, however, is looking backward, ruing the end of Western domination. James is moving both back and forth constantly throughout his piece, seeking the promise of freedom. Perhaps James’s choices reflect how the imaginative possibility and dreams of citizenship during Reconstruction, and the violently dashed hopes of Reconstruction’s demise, were smashed together wildly in the decade of his birth. It is heroic and epic verse. But the hero of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is not singular. It is a collective: black people. Perhaps we ought to consider “Lift Every Voice” as a processional in contrast to Kipling’s “Recessional,” in terms of both substance and form.
The formal aspects of the poem also stand as an interesting departure from, and a means of signifying upon, Kipling. Kipling uses the English sestet form for his rhyme scheme: ababcc, as well as the iambic tetrameter meter form (with four iambs in each stanza), while Johnson uses the Spanish sestet, as well as the six- or seven-syllable lines characteristic of Spanish poetry, and specifically Spanish sonnets. Over many subsequent years Johnson would frequently use those six- or seven-syllable lines in his poetry. This choice was indicative of Johnson’s fluency in Spanish and the influence of the multiculturalism of Jacksonville, a city with a significant Latin American Caribbean population, on his creative work. But it also reveals Johnson’s aesthetic priorities, and the imaginative world of African American letters and politics at the turn of the century in general. Johnson and his fellow race men and women were building black institutional life and black formal culture in the aftermath of slavery and in light of Jim Crow. In so doing they looked for distinction and distinctiveness, and they drew from a vast archive of earlier and global styles as they attempted to capture black life, sensibilities, and beauty. Johnson’s use of the aesthetics of Spanish poetry, his subversion of Kipling’s sense of grand purpose, and even his manner of playing with the sonnet form (the poem is eleven lines long or maybe thirteen depending on whether you count the internal rhymes) at once suggests both a searching and experimentation in his work as well as a rigorous attention to form and formalism in the creative process.
Textually, the song is filled with his political imagination. It is a procession toward liberation. The three stanzas have often been described as praise, lament, and prayer. But even within each one, they move in time between past, present, and future possibilities. Jason Moran describes the composition in the following manner:
There are two parts that drive me wild. The first four notes, LIFT, EV, RY, VOICE. . . . It ramps up you with the ascension of the melody. The second part is during the bridge, the second time we say “SING A SONG,” we switch to a minor version of the SING A SONG that was just a few measures earlier. It always made the song a little odd to me, even as a child. Like, hmmm, why do that? But on those two phrases alone, I could spend all day playing, listening and reconfiguring them. The most emotional part of the song is on the lyrics, “facing the rising sun of our new day begun.” The melody rises and it falls, and if I play it right, I always feel like I’m about to lose it emotionally in the middle of performing it. I am always on the search for measures of music that pack weight, and that phrase packs weight. It pulls us all back in out of the cold.35
For James Weldon Johnson “Lift Every Voice” was “a hymn for Negro people.” We should understand this designation, proffered by a man who declared himself agnostic, as an acknowledgment of the importance of hymnody in black cultural life. To speak to black life by using a devotional frame made perfect sense, given that churches were the earliest black American institutions, and given that at the core of black American culture was the distinct form of Christianity that black Americans created on these shores. In particular the idea of faith as a practical repository, and as an intellectual and ideological orientation looking toward freedom that stood in the face of enslavement and Jim Crow and all manner of violence faced by black America, was deeply rooted in black life during the late nineteenth century.36 It was organic philosophy as well as devotion. The sense of obligation and piety that always attended to black religious devotion grew to also be demanded in the singing of “Lift Every Voice.”
The substance of that demand with respect to “Lift Every Voice” might be described as a form of collective resilience as well as devotion. I speak of black people rather than African Americans here quite deliberately. Although, as previously stated, the Johnson brothers had ancestry in both the Bahamas and the United States, as well as Haiti, Europe, and of course Africa, the point I am making extends beyond the multinational origins of the brothers. The words America, Negro, and colored do not appear in the song. However, the story of the song traces in specific detail the experience of black people in the New World, including all of the Americas, through both slavery and freedom. It was written with so large a scope, I would argue, precisely because racial consciousness at that time for people of African descent in the diaspora was not tied as tightly to the individual nation-state as it would be in the anticolonial and anti–Jim Crow period midcentury. Though geographically spread out and culturally diverse, there was a sense of “linked fate” across islands, coasts, and interior mainlands of the New World. Though the song itself never became broadly embraced throughout the diaspora, and remained overwhelmingly associated with black people in the United States, it was written as part of a sense of racial membership that extended beyond the borders of the nation.
A year before “Lift Every Voice,” the Johnson brothers had produced a satirical opera, Toloso, that spoofed and criticized U.S. imperialism writ broadly. That work was a sign that they understood racial domination to be a global phenomenon and not merely a local one. This understanding was echoed in the black press, which consistently and comprehensively covered both local and global diasporic as well as continental African news. At the turn of the century black people were, to paraphrase Gwendolyn Brooks, a nation on no map.37 Or perhaps they were a nation on many maps.
Musically, the song reflects how black people were part of the West and yet excluded from so many parts of the lifeworlds of the West. It goes “in and out” and “up and down” as it were. Rosamond wrote it in a major key, but he shifts to a minor key tow
ard the end of each verse, moving the spirit from high to low, from hope to despair. In the first line, the pitch ascends progressively, upward with each word, depicting the aspirations of black America.
Rosamond paired sadness with triumph and resilience. The highest notes of the “Lift” are found on the words “rise,” “beat,” and “might,” giving, again, the sensibility of a march, if not the compositional form. It is slower than a march. The time signature is a 6/8, moving more like a dance. And yet it has more gravitas and plodding than what we generally hear in “war anthems.” The “break” that begins in the first verse with “sing a song” has one word for one beat. James’s use of anapestic stresses in the break of each verse (“Sing a song,” “We have come”) also suggests a march, literarily if not sonically. It gives the sense of moving in lock step, also marching forward. Also, as Rosamond was classically trained, it is worthwhile to note that this one word–one beat form is reminiscent of an operatic recitative.38 In making that section speech-like, the song moves from sounding like an anthem to feeling like a mantra. It then finishes with an extended note on the third-to-the-last line of each stanza: “us,” “slaughtered,” and “Thee” in reference to God. Over the course of all the stanzas, then, there is a posture of supplication, with “us . . . the slaughtered” appealing to God.
In a 1909 article for Colored American titled “Why They Call American Music Ragtime,” Rosamond described how the music of Spain always consists of the direct or indirect emotions of the Spanish peasantry, and how, similarly, American music is the product of the American peasant class: the Negro. Rosamond goes on to describe how the foot-tapping and hand-clapping origins of ragtime—its syncopation—are similar to the rhythm of the Spanish bolero. He argues further that his formal training in music at the New England Conservatory and in England did not and could not erase the haunting of that “spirit of melody” found in black people and black folk music. “Lift Every Voice” is anticipatory evidence of this argument: “If the baby laughs today we soon forget it until he laughs again. But if the baby dies today we never forget for it has struck the chord of the heart. Just so with lively music, we think of it while we hear it, and enjoy it as we do the pleasing things in life. But when we hear the minor strains in music we call up the sad memories we can never forget. Therefore dissonant chords are used to express the tragedies in life which are far more impressive than our moments of pleasure, which we so soon forget.”39 In “Lift Every Voice,” Rosamond merged the tragedy of the minor strain with the major aspirations, hopes, and even joys of black people.
The song encapsulated the complex fabric of black life, and it grew to be part of the complex fabric of black life. The formalism of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was born into, and existed alongside, a broader and rich tradition of vernacular music and social culture. Jacksonville was one of the homes of the blues. In fact the word blues was early on used to describe a performance in Jacksonville’s LaVilla on April 16, 1910. That very well may have been the first time the style of music that would be named the blues was designated as such.40 Jacksonville was also the home of blues queen Ma Rainey and the popular Rabbit Foot’s Company vaudeville troupe. For a time in the first decade of the twentieth century, John Robichaux, a key early jazz bandleader and composer from Louisiana, also lived there, and it was one of the childhood homes of Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist and novelist who would become one of the most important chroniclers of southern vernacular culture.
A mix of the vernacular and the formal as well as the sacred and profane were to be found in Jacksonville and other black communities throughout the nation and the Americas more broadly in the early 1900s. In this rich cultural milieu, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was situated overwhelmingly in places specifically organized for political, educational, and social mobilization and uplift. For example, in 1905, the “hymn” or “anthem” (and debate would be coming in future years about which description was most apropos) was sung by the Williams and Walker Glee Club at the opening to Booker T. Washington’s National Negro in Business League (NNBL) conference.41 The NNBL conferences were intended to operate like a think tank for the development of economic independence and racial uplift for African Americans. Although not ultimately successful in changing the staggering poverty and discrimination in employment and wages that black people faced, the NNBL did foster social networks where black small-business people and professionals shared information and resources. The song symbolized their aspiration. And the ethos of the organization, of sharing and collective uplift, was bolstered by the participants’ singing their history and charge in unison.
However, it is in the second decade of the twentieth century that “Lift Every Voice” begins to appear routinely in accounts of both more regular and widespread formal occasions such as graduations, special events in churches, and meetings of civic associations. One such institution that would adopt the song for nearly its entire existence, and into the present day, was founded in September 1913. Comprised of a group of middle-class black women of Atlanta, the Chautauqua Circle was an offshoot of the national Chautauqua movement. The first Chautauqua was created in 1874 in southwest New York. It was initially conceived of as a place where Methodist Sunday school teachers could supplement their learning in a pastoral landscape during the summers. But it soon expanded into a broader “out-of-school” learning site for adults. Visitors to Chautauqua, New York, attended lectures and read books together in organized courses. In between they biked and picnicked throughout the verdant campus.42 In the early twentieth century, correspondence courses were also formed by the organization, and smaller local Chautauquas developed in towns across the country.
Although liberal on race issues, the original Chautauqua was not particularly devoted to making itself welcoming to black participants, and the local versions were often explicitly hostile to black presence. However, black thinkers soon after its founding began to talk about creating “Negro Chautauquas.”43 In Atlanta, the African American Chautauqua Circle designated itself as a book club, but it might be better described as a comprehensive scholarly endeavor. The women of the Chautauqua Circle studied as well as read books together. They presented their research to one another, thereby amplifying and scaffolding the knowledge each acquired independently. Their concerns were global: they studied the Mexican and Bolshevik Revolutions as well as the creation of the Panama Canal and the history of the suffrage movement.44 The circle’s members included local activists in addition to intellectuals. Clara Pitts was a cofounder of a foster home. Selena Sloan Butler founded the national black PTA, and several Chautauqua Circle members worked together to establish the Gate City Free Kindergarten Association.45 This was the first kindergarten program for black children in Georgia, and by 1913 it served 200 children a year. Eventually they had five different sites in the city.
These women, who had their hands in so much of the community work in Georgia, gathered regularly as members of the Chautauqua Circle to learn, to work, and to share. And at every single meeting from 1918 to the present, they have joined hands to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Their meetings have always been an elegant ritual. Whichever member hosted a particular meeting made sure the tables were covered in beautiful linens and fine china, crystal, and silver. The circle was and is a private organization and unquestionably elite. The ladies’ gatherings were mentioned in the society pages of black newspapers with a good deal of pomp and circumstance. But the song they sang at each session was also sung in rural churches and one-room schoolhouses. Just as the Chautauqua Circle’s work reached beyond members of their class, the song they sang ritualistically tied black communities of various sorts together. And no matter who sang it, by the 1910s it was being referred to in virtually every mention as the “Negro National Anthem.” These women of the Chautauqua Circle, like the NACW (and some of them were also members of the NACW), held the song aloft through their service work and activism.46 Ceremonially, whether at the beginning of the program as a sort o
f invocation or call to prayer, or at the conclusion of the program as a benediction, or as a gift to take with you into the world, “Lift Every Voice” became a spiritual shield against racial injustice, as well as a motivator. But perhaps most important, it drew a line of membership and shaped what sociologist Michael Dawson has termed “linked fate” for African Americans, referring to the sense of a common lot across the lines of class and culture that shapes both political beliefs and action.47