by Imani Perry
If the Pan-African congresses, and the everyday reporting of black newspapers, conceived of the black world to which African Americans belonged as vast and politically complex, this was enhanced by a remarkable depth in the telling of black history, in ways that were broad, epic, and creative. There was no better evidence of this practice than what we find in the historical record about the popularity of African American historic chronicle pageants. In the words of DuBois, author of the early and influential 1911 Star of Ethiopia pageant, “It seemed to me that it might be possible with such a demonstration to get people interested in this development of Negro drama to teach . . . the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre.” DuBois, as imaginative as he was analytically brilliant, used virtually all of his own music, composed with the assistance of Rosamond, in the Star of Ethiopia. Like Garvey, DuBois reached for the symbolism of biblical Ethiopia to articulate a contemporary black identity. Representations of African culture and symbols would continue to resonate with dramaturges, and they appeared throughout subsequent pageants. However, most later pageant authors didn’t compose new music but instead looked to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for the musical climax and conclusion of their productions.
By the 1920s, these traveling events often included hundreds of untrained actors performing pieces written and directed by women dramaturges. As Soyica Diggs Colbert argues, these pageants focused on education, democracy, and uplift, yet “the pageant’s ability to entertain coincided with its ability to garner an emotional and spiritual reaction, similar to the affect that produces the shout of the church revival.”36 The appropriateness of the anthem’s repeated appearance in the pageants is evident. It was a song that had spiritual significance and moved black people when sung in unison, but it was also a song of uplift and possibility, one that itself rested upon learnedness, of music and of history.
One of the pageant dramaturges of this era, Ada Crogman, was an Atlanta native and the daughter of William Crogman, a Latin and Greek professor and later the first black president of Atlanta University. Ada attended Atlanta University and went on to study theater at Emerson College in Boston, after which she was a professor at both Alabama State College and Tennessee State University. Later, while working at the National Playground and Recreational Association of New York, Crogman wrote a pageant depicting African American history titled Milestones of a Race. Crogman traveled to various cities, setting up productions of the pageant with local casts in each city, which she both trained and directed.37 Milestones had nine scenes and consisted of folk dances, tableaux, announcers, and decorative scene setting as well as song.38 The first scene in Egypt depicted black people in “Ancient Life.” The second showed animism in West Africa by means of a ritual devotion to the crocodile. The third scene featured daily life in West Africa. The fourth represented a slave market in the United States, during which the actors sang traditional spirituals. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was featured in scene 5, set in the cotton fields, along with “Old Time Religion,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Steal Away” during the prayer meeting scene of scene 6. At the conclusion to the sixth scene, Abraham Lincoln appeared to declare the enslaved people free, and in response to this joyful event, the freedpeople sang the spiritual “Free at Last.” Scene 7 depicted the ascent of black American people through a showcase of distinguished figures, including Booker T. Washington, Bert Williams, and Charles Young. The final scene, “Progress,” brought together the entire cast, nearly 100 trained voices, singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Although the pageant was generally directed at black Americans, at times audiences were integrated, as during a 1922 performance at Memorial Hall in Dayton, Ohio. Due to its popularity with black patrons, it continued to be performed regularly throughout the 1920s.
Like many pageants, Crogman’s echoed the structure of biblical history even as it traced African and African American history. Theatergoers and performers traveled from pre–transatlantic slave trade “innocence” to the suffering of slavery, and finally to striving and ascent. The invocation was of a precolonial past, and the benediction in song carried them into the future. Moreover, the structure of the pageant also mirrored the cycles repeated within the anthem: past, present, and future; suffering, hope, and promise.
Another chronicle pageant, Temple of Progress, was written and directed by Topeka Kansas native Lillian J. Craw and performed in various cities over the 1920s. It begins with African American history on these shores: The first scene is on a plantation, with enslaved people singing and picking cotton, and contrasts that arduous labor of the day, to nighttime festivities when the enslaved could enjoy themselves and socialize with music and laughter. Temple moves on to an account of the process of emancipation, and finally the emergence of the contemporary “Queen of Progress” as a symbol of the “New Negro” striving. A newspaper account of the pageant when it was performed at Lowther Junior High in Emporia, Kansas, described it as “review[ing] the history of the Negro race . . . wherein the historical picture of the race was constructed scene by scene, through the unhappy events of slave importation and auctioning; through colonial days and the death of the first Negro who fought for America; through the nineteenth century, artistic, religious and educational and professional achievements, and the eighth scene was a tableau of the nations of the world, including the entrance of the New Negroes.” Temple of Progress was written for some 200 performers, and it also concluded with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Again, the conclusion of the pageant with the anthem underscores the social purposes these pageants served, to both educate and inspire.
In contrast to Crogman’s, Dorothy Guinn’s 1924 chronicle pageant, Out of the Dark, did not begin with Africa but rather ended with it, in the form of a tableau replica of Meta Fuller’s Ethiopia Awakening (1910), a model of a woman who looks something like a female pharaoh with her hand over her heart, a patriot to the black imagined community. At its conclusion, the chronicler of the pageant states in summation, “Out of the dark and into the light I have brought this record for you, May you have courage, Oh people, to press onward and upward to the very throne of beauty and truth.” The cast concluded the performance with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”39 The use of Fuller’s sculpture at the conclusion is a sign of the early twentieth-century historical Pan-Africanism in black American communities that sought to recover an illustrious pre–transatlantic slave trade past. There is a subversion, the African past is not “dark”; instead, the pageant brings viewers from the darkness of slavery “into the light” of African iconography built by the hands of an African American woman. “Lift Every Voice,” with its cyclical time and nationalism bound to a racial identity rather than a nation-state, echoes the themes of Guinn’s pageant.
Instructive as well as uplifting, these pageants were forms of political theater. Through them, black Americans could rehearse their identities as members of a transnational and modern people, with an epic history—one of endurance—while at the same time the participants in each show forged bonds with fellow members of the cast who were often neighbors, as the casts were almost always comprised of local talent. Pageants provided occasions to act out the freedom that was being sought. And for both audience and actors they were an opportunity to assert one’s worthiness. In the performances “Lift Every Voice” operated as at once a recessional and a processional. Pageants were a charge of sorts, encouraging people to leave the theater emboldened by the recollection of resilience in black history, and to proceed forward, ready to face the world.
Less widely popular, but no less critical to African American artistic development, was the work of writers shaped by “Lift Every Voice” during the New Negro Era. This is due both to James Weldon Johnson’s parental influence in the Harlem Renaissance and to the mandate for artists to effectively capture black expression, culture, and aesthetics in the “New Negro” movement. For example, Langston Hughes, who was known for his vernacular genius, neverthe
less drew upon the form and formalism embedded in the anthem. His poem “Youth,” which appeared under this title in his collection Dreamkeepers (1932), was first published untitled in the Crisis in 1924:
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame
Yesterday
A night-gone thing
A sun-down name
And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came
We march!40
The movement through time across the stanzas—“tomorrow,” “yesterday,” and “today”—mirrors the temporal movement in the verses of “Lift Every Voice.” Likewise, the references to light (“bright,” “flame,” “sun-down,” “dawn”) and finally of course “the road” on which we are to “march,” all hearken back to the anthem.
Gwendolyn Bennett dedicated her poem “To Usward,” published in the Crisis in 1924, “to Negro Youth, known and unknown, who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth. Especially dedicated to Jessie Fauset upon the event of her novel, There Is Confusion. Bennett draws on both “Lift Every Voice” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” in a meditation upon both individual yearning and collective singing that yields collective strength.
Let us be still
As ginger jars are still
Upon a Chinese shelf.
And let us be contained
By entities of Self. . . .
Not still with lethargy and sloth,
But quiet with the pushing of our growth.
Not self-contained with smug identity
But conscious of the strength in entity.
If any have a song to sing
That’s different from the rest,
Oh let them sing
Before the urgency of Youth’s behest!
For some of us have songs to sing
Of jungle heat and fires,
And some of us are solemn grown,
With pitiful desires,
And there are those who feel the pull,
Of seas beneath the skies,
And some there be who want to croon
Of Negro lullabies.
We claim no part with racial dearth;
We want to sing the songs of birth!
And so we stand like ginger jars
Like ginger jars bound round
With dust and age;
Like jars of ginger we are sealed
By nature’s heritage.
But let us break the seal of years,
With pungent thrusts of song,
For there is joy in long-dried tears
For whetted passions of a throng!41
Bennett ends with a couplet that vaguely echoes the meter of the “sing a song” break in “Lift Every Voice.” Throughout the poem, the lifted voice of song is the sound of hope and breaking through bonds to reach freedom. In sensibility, then, it mirrors “Lift Every Voice.” What DuBois referred to as “the veil” in his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk is Bennett’s ginger jar, which will release a sweet fragrance when unsealed.
In a 1926 essay, Georgia Douglas Johnson (no relation to the lyricist and composer of “Lift Every Voice”) was more explicit in her references. “The Gift of Song” appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier and reads like a praise poem to the anthem: “Song is a divine gift. When the chords about the heart are strung to the breaking point-sing. Sing your cares away. Soon the chords begin to loosen and tears may fall soothing the spirit like spring showers. James Johnson, who knows the long long night of sorrow, bide us ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ to be able to sing is a divine gift. Birds of prey never sing.”42 The testimonial, as to the spiritual benefits of song, also gives us a means of interpreting how “Lift Every Voice” entailed a philosophical argument of sorts about black humanity and existence. To sing is to be more than a work horse or a bird of prey. To create beauty is to refuse and refute efforts to degrade you.
In a simple couplet, Sterling Brown’s poem “Salutamus,” from his 1932 collection Southern Road,43 does something similar. The lines “What though some roads wind through a gladsome land / it is a gloomy path that we must go” poignantly capture the promise and peril of this nation, so dependent upon the side of the color line on which one stood. The road is stony, but it must be taken nevertheless.
According to literary scholar Robert Stepto, Frederick Douglass initiated a tradition in African American letters of seeing movement and literacy as tied to freedom.44 While they had quite literal reference points in the narrative: Douglass escaped from slavery and violated the laws against literacy for enslaved people, literacy and movement became symbolic modes of representing freedom throughout black aesthetics. Johnson uses movement multiple times in “Lift Every Voice”: “let us march on,” “stony the road we trod,” “we have come over a way,” and so on. Similarly, Brown depicts a path toward freedom that is treacherous yet necessary.
Countee Cullen, one of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the very few people who treated “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in a satirical rather than pious fashion. His only novel, One Way to Heaven, was published in 1932.45 Although critically panned, mostly for ineffective plotting, it gave full display to Cullen’s cutting wit. One character, based on Jessie Fauset, is named “Mrs. Harold De Peyster Johnson.” Cullen lifted the name “Mrs. Harold De Peyster” from a 1904 book of manners,46 a clever dig at Fauset’s bourgeois unflappability. In describing Mrs. Harold de Peyster, Cullen wrote that her “race consciousness dated back some seven or eight years. She had, as it were, midwifed at the New Negro’s birth, and had groaned in spirit with the travail and suffering of Ethiopia in delivering herself of this black enfant terrible, born, capped and gowned, singing ‘The Negro National Anthem’ and clutching in one hand a pen, in the other a paint brush. In the eyes of Mrs. De Peyster Johnson this youngster could do no wrong nor had his ancestors ever been guilty of a moral lapse.”47 Cullen’s teasing about the perfectionism of a certain branch of New Negro ideology and aspiration presents “Lift Every Voice” as a part of a stodgy race woman and race man practice that could be stifling. Notwithstanding Cullen’s impiousness and revelation that the era’s “lifting as we climb” politics weren’t unanimously embraced, it was standard in black communities in the early twentieth century to treat “Lift Every Voice” in near-religious fashion. Honor and fidelity to its substance characterized the overwhelming majority of references to it, and criticism was scattered and rare. Even Dubose Heyward, a white Charleston writer who wrote about black Gullah life, most famously in Porgy and Bess, treated the anthem reverently. His 1929 novel Mamba’s Daughters, which was serialized in the Baltimore Afro-American, traced three generations of black women. The grandmother, Mamba, is a figure who works to ingratiate herself to Charleston’s white elites by affecting a “Mammy” masquerade while in domestic service. Underneath her stereotypical role-playing are Mamba’s hopes for her granddaughter Lissa. Lissa’s mother, and Mamba’s daughter, is depicted as monstrous: hulking, ignorant, and prone to violence although crudely protective of her child. Lissa is the repository of the family’s future. Because Lissa is a gifted singer, Mamba’s employer, a white Charlestonian named Saint Wentworth, pays for Lissa to study opera in New York. After years of study, Lissa has her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. At the conclusion of her performance, the audience “got to their feet and cheered. They kept the clamour going with a sort of mad persistence. After five minutes of it the curtain was seen to move, rising slowly on the bright vacant wings.” Lissa returns to the edge of the stage. “She stopped where she was just out of the wings and unaccompanied commenced to sing the National Anthem of the American Negro.” Wentworth, who is watching her performance, has never heard the song before. “From the first note he was aware of an absolutely new sensation. Against his perception beat the words of James Weldon Johnson’s inspiring poem swept forward in the marching rhythm of Rosamond’s music.” As he listens
, Wentworth “felt suddenly the impact of something tremendously and self-consciously racial; something that had done with apologies for being itself, done with imitations, reaching back into its own origin, claiming its heritage of beauty from the past.”48
For Heyward, Wentworth is a semiautobiographical character, and his encounter with the song is a sort of baptism and reckoning with the complex and beautiful truth of blackness. Although not black, Heyward crafted a “New Negro” novel that repeated, like so many rituals within the black community, the idea that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a powerful articulation of the souls of black folk.
This sense that a spiritual renewal and reckoning with truth might take place by means of the mantra-like singing of the anthem is not limited to imaginative literature. Rather, the literature captured something about the spiritual dimension of the ritual of singing “Lift Every Voice.” Frequently, the devotional singing of the song was part of church programs. Given the importance of churches in African American cultural and social life, this is unsurprising. Churches were places for people to gather, to organize, to socialize, and to celebrate, in addition to being sites of ritualized religious ceremonies. But even in moments that were explicitly and primarily religious, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” could be part of the program. When it was, it was usually the only song that was not gospel or a religious hymn. Furthermore, it was sometimes incorporated into moments of spiritual beckoning. Sylvia Woods, founder of the famous Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem, recalls of her childhood in South Carolina, “During the 1930s as a small child I would often sit on the floor near the fireplace (where there were invariably a few sweet potatoes roasting in the ashes) and listen to my mother, grandmother and other female relatives telling stories and singing their ‘burden-lifting’ songs as they quilted. As the women sang the lines ‘God of our weary years / God of our silent tears’ they would stop quilting. Then in unison, they’d rock their heads back and forth, pat their feet, and clap loudly.”49