by Imani Perry
Singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was integral to the ethos of the illustrious school. Fannie Douglass, born in 1883, who married the grandson of Frederick Douglass and whose older sister had attended Atlanta University with James and Rosamond, taught at Dunbar for many decades and brought “Lift Every Voice” to the school. She recalled that “when I went to Atlanta to attend the graduation services of my niece Jessie, they sang the Johnson brothers anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ When I began teaching in the schools—and I did shortly afterwards—I brought that composition, and I was the first one to introduce it in the Washington schools, and to all of Washington. Now everybody knows it, don’t you see?”23 Her friend Mary Europe, the sister of bandleader James Europe, was a fellow teacher at Dunbar for many years and “had the idea to give the children the very best in music.” The curriculum at Dunbar, despite the vocational designation placed upon it by the school board, was in fact a liberal education rich in the visual arts, theater, and music as well as rigorous academic training.24 The formalism embedded in the song matched the classical education the students at Dunbar received, and the complexity of the composition testified to the “very best” training in music and the arts.
Many historically black colleges also provided access to high school education, as did a number of boarding schools that were also established in the early part of the twentieth century. The tight connection between historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and K–12 education was both academic and cultural. HBCU faculty were involved at every stage of the school-building programs, as well as in developing curricula, and were active participants in the teachers associations. The socialization of black students into black formalism that occurred in the primary grades was extended into high schools and colleges.
The Lincoln Institute, a college preparatory high school that would send a significant portion of its graduates to historically black colleges and universities, was founded in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1908, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s upholding the Kentucky Supreme Court’s ruling that the integrated Berea College violated the state’s segregation statute.25 Berea educators and board members, as well as activist friends of the school, did not want to give up the mission of educating black people, and so Lincoln emerged in the aftermath of that devastating decision. Lincoln Institute was initially conceived of as both a high school and a junior college, but it eventually became solely a high school. Founders, however, were forced to make it a boarding school rather than a day school in large part because white landowners in Shelby County objected to the idea of a local high school that would potentially draw more black residents to the area.26 Dunbar had certainly driven migration to Washington, D.C., and the Lincoln Institute might have done the same.27
But despite being kept from residing in large numbers in Shelby County, black Kentuckians nevertheless figured out how to run a superior black high school there. Lincoln Institute, like Dunbar, would train many students who went on to distinguished careers. Two of its alums, Whitney Young Jr. (whose father was the head of the school) and Horace Mann Bond (whose son Julian Bond would go on to become a leader in the civil rights movement), rose to public acclaim. Whitney Young Jr. became the executive director of the NAACP, and Bond served as president of both Fort Valley State University and Lincoln University, and as a member of the faculty at Fisk, Atlanta University, and Dillard. He also, notably, produced scholarship that sharply refuted the widespread mythology that African Americans possessed lower intelligence, work that undoubtedly was shaped by his formative experiences at excellent black institutions throughout the South.
In all of these varied types of schools in the segregated South, the students learned to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Frequently it was a daily practice, but at some schools it was reserved for weekly assemblies. It was almost always a part of graduation. In North Carolina, for example, “at a typical Rosenwald elementary graduation . . . everyone sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”28 The girls wore white dresses and the boys wore dark suits, each decorated with a carnation bouquet or boutonniere made of colored tissue paper. The programs would include a prayer and a scripture reading, as well as poetry and recitation. Both the valedictorian and salutatorian would deliver speeches to inspire their classmates in their future endeavors.
At the Beulah Rucker Oliver School in Gainesville, Georgia, founded in 1914, students started the day with devotions and “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song was enmeshed in a curriculum that celebrated black culture and traditions. Students at the Oliver School studied African American history as a regular part of the curriculum, including lessons on Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and reading and reciting poetry by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.29 The founder and principal, Beulah Oliver, wrote plays based on black history that her students would perform. Oliver, a pathbreaking educator, was the first African American woman in Georgia to receive a Rosenwald grant for her school, and the first woman of any race to establish a school in Gainesville. She had herself fought mightily for access to education. One of eight children born to a sharecropping family, she learned her letters by looking at the newspapers that plastered her family cabin’s walls, a common method of insulation. Oliver worked her way through Knox Institute, an industrial school in Georgia, and upon completion of that program raised money to build her school by offering music lessons and making hats in addition to teaching. Reflecting on these efforts, she wrote, “I have had to sacrifice time, both day and night, to light a torch of instruction which I hope will cause the public to see the purpose of this much-needed institution for my race.”30
While running the school, Oliver also pursued a bachelor’s degree by correspondence from Savannah State, and finally completed it in 1944. Although her own education had been limited by the industrial education model, Oliver provided rigorous academic and religious training for her students in addition to a demanding schedule that included tending to livestock, pumping well water, maintaining property, and selling handmade rugs to raise funds for the school. While numerous black teachers went to northern universities to study in the early twentieth century, often paid for by their state governments according to the “separate but equal” rules of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that the NAACP was steadily forcing states to comply with. But even someone like Rucker who didn’t have access to the cutting-edge pedagogy that could much more readily be accessed up north, or to the elite black universities of the South, figured out how to provide an exceptional and culturally rich education to her students.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a piece of this. It was a dimension of how black formalism existed within segregated schools of even the most bare and rugged sort. Noted twentieth-century blues and jazz critic Albert Murray, who grew up in coastal Alabama and matriculated at Tuskegee, eloquently captured this role of “Lift Every Voice,” and the zeitgeist of black life that it represented, in his classic memoir South to a Very Old Place (1971):
You remember how during your days at Mobile County Training School the rotogravure sepia images of DuBois in his satanic goatee, Booker T. Washington (close-cropped, beardless, full lipped and without mustache), Frederick Douglass (coin-perfect in his lion’s mane), Harriet Tubman in her glorious bandanna . . . and all of the rest of them used to blend together in a sepia bronze panorama when the student body used to stand and sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” . . . which everybody used to call the Negro National Anthem—but which for you was first of all the Brown American school bell anthem (the comb your hair, brush your teeth, shine your shoes, crease your trousers, tie your tie, clean your nails rub a dub stand and sit and look straight make folks proud anthem). So far as you are concerned, not even Martin Luther King . . . could inspire his most eager followers to put as much aspiration and determination into “We Shall Overcome” as people always used to get into James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson’s school bell song.31
In a paragraph, Murray encapsula
tes the formalism of grooming, attire, and comportment, as well as the aspiration and ritual attached to coming of age and being of school age in the segregated South.
Murray’s alma mater had been established as the first county training school in Alabama in 1880. County training schools were rural institutions sponsored by the Slater and Jeanes Funds, which required a manual- and industrial-educational model. James D. Anderson describes how black teachers and community members efforts to evade the academic constraints of the county training school model were diligently policed by philanthropists, who sought only to train black people to be workers, not intellectuals or full participants in the political and social world of the nation.32 Murray’s recollection reveals, however, that teachers nevertheless found ways to give students a broader sense of themselves and their potential through curricula and through ritual singing of the Negro National Anthem.
The distinguished jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie also fondly recalled the role of the anthem in his education. Dizzy, whom Murray described as “an irrepressible showman and prankster, belong[ing] in the triumvirate of trumpet definitive style setters with Armstrong and Miles Davis,”33 was born and raised in rural Cheraw, South Carolina, just south of the North Carolina border and 150 miles inland. Cotton fields, in Gillespie’s day, covered more than 75 percent of the landscape and the vast majority of the 1,300 black residents, Dizzy included, picked cotton for a living. Teachers were the only black public employees. Firefighting, police, and road maintenance were “whites only” jobs. A mere ten teachers worked at the one school that served black children. The town spent ten dollars a year on educating each black child and forty dollars on each white one.34 Dizzy fondly remembered his school, named Robert Smalls, after an enslaved man who commandeered a Confederate ship during the Civil War, delivering seventeen of his fellow enslaved people to freedom and later serving five terms as a member of Congress as well as a persistent advocate for black citizenship. Gillespie described the humble building named after this heroic figure as “a quaintly pretty little school [with] one little wooden building on the side of Front Street that housed the primer grades and a larger brick building that housed the first through ninth grades. This little wooden building on the side had only one story. After you stepped off the sidewalk onto the school grounds, you’d go up those little brick stairs and right there in front, every morning, we’d have our assembly. We’d have to stand at attention and sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing, til earth and heaven ring.’”35
This daily habit was obviously influential to the future musician, as he recalled it so tenderly in his memoir. But it is also worth noting that musicianship generally was a part of school practice in the segregated South. Surveying early curricula, it becomes clear that sight reading of music and music theory were common courses in black schools. Additionally, music education outside of school was a frequent expenditure. This necessarily meant it was highly valued given how strapped most black communities were economically. Dizzy’s childhood friend from Cheraw, John Motley, recalled, “We couldn’t vote, we couldn’t use the library. And they drummed into us that menial labor was our lot. All we had was school, the church and music. And our black public school didn’t really meet our needs because it ended in the ninth grade; the white schools went on through the twelfth. So it was church and music.”36
The educator and native Mississippian Mildred Hudson similarly learned “Lift Every Voice” in the context of the rural segregated southern community and ascribed deep spiritual meaning to the school bell song.
We sang it in our small wooden church and at the beginning of each school day. Surrounded by thick willows, pecan trees, oaks and pines, we crawled under our one-room schoolhouse and sang the song during recess. At home, my mother, Willie Ester Wright Hudson, born in 1912, would sing “Lift Every Voice” as she went about her daily chores. She would lift her proud brown chin and strike the perfect note as she reinforced what had by then become our family’s dream: “Let us march on til victory is won.” We desperately needed that song. I grew up in a segregated black world of rich soil, pungent gospel flavor and swinging in the rhythm of the blues. But it was also a world where the KKK ruled and black men often found themselves facing death with a noose around their necks.
The contrast between “a generous and loving black community but also a world teeming with white supremacists, white sheets, and red-faced white men with rancor dripping from their hearts”in Johnson’s life was in fact captured in the words to the song,37 which spoke of endurance, striving, and ascent notwithstanding the devastation of a racist society. Recollecting the horror of Emmett Till’s murder Hudson added, “As a child, of course, I did not have many ways to analyze national issues or ask the right questions, but singing the right songs helped.”38
Guided group singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a means of socializing black children. It gave them a way of understanding the world and finding self-worth despite its meanness. It also could provide a pathway toward forging identity. Evelio Grillo, who migrated to Florida in the 1920s from Cuba, described his experience at Booker T. Washington High School:
The faculty at Booker T. Washington High fully confirmed our identity as black youth. . . . One vehicle that our teachers used to inculcate a sense of history and a determination to make things better was the “Devotions” period held every day at 15 minutes before noon. One teacher or the other would give an inspirational talk or read a great passage urging us to strive to do our best. Sometimes the program would open with the singing of a spiritual or of a patriotic song like “America the Beautiful.” Always we closed with a rousing rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The characters and personalities of our great committed teachers led us to develop comfort with our identity as black Americans. They placed the mission ever before us: nothing less than freedom and equality. In our daily contacts with them they made us feel as co-conspirators in the struggle to bring the walls of racial injustice and discrimination down.39
The immanence of daily singing developed into an intimately held knowledge. Not simply of history, but also resilience and resistance. It, along with a host of complementary ritual practices, created young people who were able to recast and ultimately transform this nation and world.
While Evelio learned to become a black American through these ritual practices, black American children also learned to see themselves as part of a global community like their parents. In the 1920s children’s branches of the NAACP learned African songs, performed plays about historic figures such as Crispus Attucks and the Haitian independence leader Toussaint-Louverture, created scrapbooks of black achievement with clippings from newspapers, and learned to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The September 1921 edition of the Crisis includes a discussion of the Dyer Antilynching Bill that was being introduced in Congress (it passed the House but failed in the Senate in 1924), an argument for Pan-Africanism, and a report that “one hundred leaders of the Student Young Men’s Christian Association, at their annual summer conference at Gibsland, Ia, announced that they will introduce into their schools and colleges ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ the national Negro hymn.” This context was appropriate, as the hymn was always embedded in a sense of a larger black world. The educational function of the song extended out of formal classrooms to the educational mission of churches and other civic institutions to instruct children about the vast world to which they belonged.
And for some, their communities themselves were international in composition. When Nannie Helen Burroughs Training School for Women in Washington, D.C., held its fifteenth commencement in 1925, it featured student orations and spirituals, and in the standard ritual of black formalism the students and audience sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” together at the beginning of the program. Distinguished black minister Vernon Johns delivered the commencement address, and prizes were granted to the most accomplished students: The first honor prize, a gold watch, was delivered to Miss Eleathea Stubblefield of Liberia, W
est Africa. The student orations, also reserved for exceptional students, were titled “We Can Win” by Clara Leticia Walker, also of Liberia, “Domestic Science in Terms of Health and Happiness” by Willa Lee Green of Porter, Oklahoma, and “The World Is Looking for Rowana” by Edna Mae Cook, a local student.40 This ceremonial program provides an important reminder that black American life throughout the twentieth century included the broader black world, particularly in its educational institutions, which drew students from the Caribbean and Africa, as well as from various parts of the United States. Under the banner of a single song, the imagined community of the black world striving to escape the thumb of colonialism, Jim Crow, and racism, could band together.
The domestic world black Americans inhabited was itself networked and complex. Teachers were fundamental participants in this matrix. Recently, education historians have increasingly argued that the role of black teachers in the road to civil rights has been underestimated. For example, Vanessa Siddle Walker shows, in detailed analyses of records of local chapters of teachers organizations and the NAACP, that educators and the NAACP waged parallel, interdependent, and overlapping struggles for educational equity, with black educators often important figures in political organizing.41 Moreover, as Theresa Perry notes, the role prominent black thinkers and organizers such as W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson played in the development of black children in the early twentieth century has been neglected. Teaching was understood as not just a job but also a calling. It was also one of the few professions available to college-educated black people, and as a result many of them built careers serving black youth. They pursued their work not simply as training but also as a social justice movement. In addition to the active connections between the local and national teachers organization, women’s clubs, as well as the national Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (i.e., the national black PTA), worked closely with teachers (quite unlike the mainstream national PTA, which was often in conflict with educators).42 These were collective and communitarian labors.