May We Forever Stand

by Imani Perry

  A bigger frustration for ABB members participating in the Sanhedrin was Miller’s refusal to seriously include a discussion of labor issues as central to black politics. Their frustration anticipated what would eventually lead founding member W. E. B. DuBois to also break with the group. There were many ruptures in black and between black organizations in the early twentieth century, based upon substantive political differences, although sometimes also on personality conflicts. However, the idea that it was necessary to gather and attempt to struggle across the differences, appears over and over again in gatherings like the Negro Sanhedrin of 1924. And this perhaps indicates something about why “Lift Every Voice” would be embraced by so many different organizations over a rather long period of time. A sense of linked fate, common identity, and shared purpose existed across borders of states, nation-states, and classes for black people under Jim Crow and colonialism. While the political ends might vary, the sense that their fate was shared went deep.

  When we look to other works of art that served as companion pieces to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” particularly ones that emerge from the black Left, we see a pairing of a broad racial identification, with a race-based political ideology, often to powerful and provocative effect.

  Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” was first published in 1919. Known as a manifesto of the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, this poem by a member of the African Blood Brotherhood was a response to the racial violence that erupted throughout the United States in the Red Summer of 1919. During the 1920s it was frequently paired on black programs with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The two pieces complimented each other. Both are heroic, though “If We Must Die” is much more militant, championing a willingness to give up one’s life in the struggle for freedom: “If we must die, O let us nobly die, / So that our precious blood may not be shed / In vain; then even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!”59 “Lift Every Voice” is more contemplative, moving between endurance, striving, and transcendence. “If We Must Die” made “Lift Every Voice” feel more radical and bolder when placed alongside it. Together, they deepened the politics of black aesthetics.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, there were also explicitly multiracial contexts in which the ideology of the radical Left was situated alongside the singing of, or reference to, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” At a 1929 protest in support of the unionization of black porters,60 William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), spoke passionately in support of African American organized labor, after which the crowd stood and sang “Lift Every Voice.” He invited them to sing the song, a marker of black collective identity, as an effort to make inroads with black workers after decades of hostility from white workers, and in the hope that the AFL branches that had a history of egregiously racist activity might be moved to change through the symbolism of this invitation. Ultimately, however, notwithstanding Green’s worthy intentions, they were not enough to transform the AFL’s poor treatment of black people. And so in retrospect, the singing resonates as a demand powerfully made, though unmet.

  The relationship between the white Left and the masses of black people writ large in the United States dovetailed in some common causes: exploitation, domination, and the oppression of the peasantry and working classes. Therefore a symbol or signifier of blackness could readily be deployed for the Left’s political messages, notwithstanding the uneasy alliances that frequently characterized the relationship between the white and black Lefts. This was evident in a humorous textual play on “Lift Every Voice” written by a black communist.

  On November 12, 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper published lyrics to a parodic version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” written by a man named Charles Gaines. The parody had also been published ten days earlier in the Daily Worker, a Communist Party newspaper in New York. However, its significance changed in those few days. In the week and a half between the Daily Worker publication and the Afro-American publication, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided Powell v. Alabama, reversing the state convictions of nine black youths from Scottsboro, Alabama,61 who had been falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in 1931. Characteristic of Jim Crow justice, all but the twelve-year-old among them were rapidly convicted and sentenced to death. Their convictions had been appealed by the Lawyers Guild of the Communist Party, which took on cases that mainstream civil rights organizations, most notably the NAACP, shied away from as too dangerous. The Scottsboro trials garnered international attention as a sign of the depth of American racial injustice.

  George B. Murphy, a slim, sharp-witted, pipe-smoking friend of DuBois, was a member of the family that owned the Afro-American, and served as the paper’s Harlem correspondent. A leftist, Murphy mostly covered NAACP activities but was frustrated that the association had chosen a narrow approach to advocacy. He believed it was failing black America by not lodging massive protests in support of black defendants like the Scottsboro boys, and therefore leaving advocacy for black people who were unjustly convicted of crimes to others, in this instance the Communist Party. We can surmise that in publishing a communist-inflected parody of the NAACP’s “official song” in one of the nation’s most prominent black newspapers, Murphy was taking a subtle dig at the organization. The parody read as follows:

  Lift every voice and sing

  Til Communism rings

  Rights with the true Soviet liberty;

  Let our revolting rise

  high as the listening skies

  Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

  Sing a sing, full of the strife that the dark past has taught us,

  Sing a song, full of the hope communism has brought us.

  Facing a red, red sun, of a new day begun

  Let us fight on til victory is won.

  Stony the road we trod,

  Bitter oppression’s rod

  Felt in the days when bourgeois bosses lied.

  Yet with a steady beat,

  will not our weary feet

  Come to the placed for which our comrades tried . . .

  We have come, over a way perseverance has watered

  We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

  Out of the gloomy past

  til now our working class

  Waves the red gleam of our red flag at last

  Boss of our youthful years

  Boss of our futile fears

  You who have fought us all along our way;

  You! Whose imperialist might

  Forced us into the fight.

  We shall forever struggle for workers rights.

  So our feet stray from the places our boss where we met you

  So our hearts drunk in our faith in Communism forget you

  Shadowed beneath Red bands

  Red ranks expand

  True to man, true to Soviet Land.62

  The parody was more than funny, it was a crude assertion of the black American condition as understood through the agenda of the Communist Party USA. This version did not catch on. There’s no surprise there. It was a clever one-off, not a ballad or poem meant to be embraced or treated ceremonially. But the mere existence of this parody does further reveal how rooted the song was in black American culture, and how it might be referenced in an effort to insist that black politics become bolder.

  The Great Depression devastated Americans and made the cause of leftists stronger. Black Americans who had already lived under Depression-like conditions faced even more adversity. Their migration to southern, midwestern, and northern cities temporarily largely ceased. But black Americans “moved” in another way. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies would lead African Americans to overwhelmingly shift their political party allegiances away from the Republicans. They began to vote Democrat in order to vote for Roosevelt. Some New Deal policies significantly alleviated the suffering of the black poor, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public work relief program for
unmarried and unemployed men, and the distribution of relief provisions, which provided basic subsistence when people were confronted with the possibility of literally starving to death. However, the entire New Deal enterprise was shot through with racial inequality.

  That inequality of assistance during the Depression had economic consequences that African Americans feel to this day. A primary example is the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA was created to underwrite mortgages, thereby dramatically increasing the number of American homeowners through extended mortgage payback time frames (from five years to thirty) and a dramatically reduced required down payment (down from 50 percent to 10 percent). Under the administrative authority of the FHA, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) contracted a survey of American cities in order to create “residential security maps.” These maps nominally gave information on the level of risk for real estate investments. However, they defined neighborhoods with high percentages of African Americans and or high rates of racial integration as de facto high risk, regardless of other social or economic factors. As such, they named and made black neighborhoods ineligible for financing. At the same time, the prevalence of racially restrictive covenants in white neighborhoods, as well as white mob responses to black efforts to integrate predominantly black neighborhoods, made moving out of neighborhoods deemed high risk a virtual impossibility for black people in many cities. African Americans were not simply geographically constrained, they also were excluded from the federal program that would be the vehicle by which the majority of Americans would move into the middle classes and build wealth. At the same time, the jobs program of the National Recovery Authority under the New Deal gave white Americans preference in job placement and maintained a lower pay scale for African Americans. And the Social Security Act excluded the two most common forms of labor for African Americans—agricultural and domestic—from Social Security benefits. Furthermore, because the Agricultural Adjustment Administration incentivized landowners to reduce production, sharecroppers lost even that lowest-status work in dramatic numbers. In the midst of all this, the NAACP appealed to Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill, and even that he refused. The New Deal was, simply put, both separate and unequal.

  The NAACP’s second Amenia Conference was called by Joel Spingarn in 1933 in response to the Great Depression. The proceedings signaled a political shift of the NAACP more decidedly to the left. It was a widespread national shift, but in particular the NAACP had to respond to the challenges brought, and strides made, by the Communist Party, particularly in the South. For the first time as a group, the NAACP began to think about class as a central factor in the lives of black people, rather than framing the problems confronting black people overwhelmingly or solely in terms of race. New leaders emerged, including the young University of Chicago–trained sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and the Harvard-trained political scientist Ralph Bunche, both of whom situated their understanding of race in terms of economic conditions. Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP, however, was hesitant about taking a strong position regarding the economic agenda for black Americans, despite the shifting sensibilities of most of the membership and administration. In contrast, DuBois grew to identify as a socialist even more deeply in the 1930s, although he also maintained his belief that race was a central problem on its own, in terms of not merely the domestic color line but also the international one he had identified back in 1903.

  An example of this emphasis can be found in a 1936 address given by W. E. B. DuBois at Symphony Hall in Boston. The program was sponsored by the Community Church of Boston, an experimental congregation with a free-form style of worship including regular lectures on contemporary social and political issues. It saw itself as fulfilling “the task of building a new social order out of the wreck left by the World War.” DuBois’s address was titled “The Italo-Ethiopian Situation: Its Relation to the Black People in Africa.”63 His lecture was preceded by an adagio by J. S. Bach, a selection by Claude Debussy, and, immediately before his talk, a symphonic performance of “Lift Every Voice.” The Community Church of Boston was organized around a commitment to a “leveling out” of worship and a radically democratic liturgical practice. It preached openness in terms of authority and legitimacy in every arena, from sacred music to ecclesiastic roles. That the predominantly white and middle- to upper-class church brought the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice,” and the cause of Ethiopian people against the colonial ambitions of Italy, to its congregation signaled the political searching and leftward impulses of the 1930s.

  But much more significantly, with respect to growing leftist politics, “Lift Every Voice” served as the opening for the first conference of the National Negro Congress (NNC). In 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern announced that the Communist Party was going to create political coalitions and allegiances with other antifascist parties. This became known as the Popular Front. In the United States, rather than opposing Roosevelt and his New Deal policies, communists began to embrace them. They became more active in trade unions, in particular the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), as well as in popular arts and music. The Popular Front also allowed for an even more facile merging between black culture and left politics than previous efforts.

  The NNC grew out of discussions initiated by Communist delegates to the 1935 conference of the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR) on the economic status of African Americans. Hoping to consolidate and unite various organizations working against racial discrimination, the JCNR created a committee of sixty organizers and activists to organize and host a conference in February 1936.

  That month, 800 delegates from over 500 organizations gathered in Chicago. A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who had once been a socialist but by 1936 had begun his drift to the right, was elected president of the organization. That Randolph wasn’t on the far left didn’t matter in the context of the Popular Front Communist Party politics of that era. The Front did not seek to proselytize but rather to participate and facilitate. By the conclusion of the conference, the delegates decided on an organizing strategy that included working on attaining fair employment and housing rights, ending police brutality, achieving membership in racially exclusive unions, and opposing fascism and imperialism.

  Black Americans engaged in the political sphere and explored political ideologies in a plethora of ways in the 1930s. A good argument could be made that this was the time of the widest breadth of political imagination for Americans in general and for African Americans in particular. Certainly some organizations were relatively conservative, such as the Urban League, but others, such as the NAACP, the Communist Party, and the African Blood Brotherhood, stood somewhere between liberal and left. And the politics of many other local and national organizations varied depending upon the constituencies of their time and place.

  Remarkably, then, sociologists in the 1930s painted these varying political imaginaries with one broad stroke: as nationalistic, and dangerously so. Prominent labor economist Walter Daykin described all black political and cultural development with skepticism and even derision. Of efforts to create a historical archive for African Americans, he wrote, “Certain elaborate techniques have been created by Negroes in order to develop their history and at the same time to spread this rapidly growing nationalism. Chief among these techniques is the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, an organization which spreads facts about the race in order to keep Negro incidents in the range of the consciousness of the members of the group, particularly the younger generation. This organization is dominated by Carter G. Woodson.”64

  Though it was unquestionably a legitimate academic endeavor, Daykin treated black history as just shy of traitorous. In the face of lynching, restrictive covenants, and segregation, he called African Americans “hypersensitive” with respect to racism, saying, “Usually the members of an exploited group ar
e abnormally subjective and as a result they are handicapped in an objective treatment of their own problems. So hypersensitive and suspicious do they become that they are likely to interpret almost any experience personally. Aggressiveness to overcome an inferior status often results.”

  For Daykin, even the efforts to establish and maintain black institutions, such as the black press, in the face of exclusion from those of the mainstream were a sign of alarming nationalist sentiment: “The dominating tone of the contemporary Negro literature is unrest which is a result of either real or imaginary neglect. Similarly the Negro press communicates a militant attitude. Furthermore Negroes are reacting negatively to specific white cultural traits, such as the white doll, and they are advocating the creation of their own traits such as Negro dolls and racial music. The Garvey movement emphasized a black Madonna, black Christ, and a black God. The Negroes are extremely sensitive as illustrated by their demands that they be called ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’”

  Daykin, unsurprisingly, saw “Lift Every Voice” as a sign of black infidelity to the nation-state, regardless of the song’s content or the context in which it was sung:

  A Negro national anthem has been written and is often sung at these celebrations. Negroes are urged to appeal to boards of education for the adoption of Negro history text books, or to induce libraries and schools to purchase Negro literature and pictures of notable men of the race. All Negroes are appealed to for knowledge of Negro family history or for any facts considered pertinent to Negro history. The above devices facilitate Negro ethno-centrism and assist in the formation of a body of Negro achievements to which the race can point with pride. Negro historical writings are further characterized by racial biases, moralizations, and rationalization. Practically all the black historians are compiling data in order to interpret world history from a racial point of view. These historians are partisan, and often record data with the conscious purpose of gaining converts to the Negro’s cause. Ethical judgments are passed upon events chronicled.65