by Imani Perry
The proceedings of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association’s annual meetings offer a glimpse into how communities were forged to do this collective work. In 1926, for example, the association assembled at Quinn Chapel in Louisville for its fiftieth annual session.43 In attendance there were teachers, school librarians, and members of the state parent teacher association. As part of the first evening’s program, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier gave a lecture titled “Contribution of Social Service Work to the Education of the Negro in the South,” and Charlotte Hawkins Brown delivered an address titled “What to Teach Negro Americans.” As with most annual meetings, it included presentations from educators and leaders from rural as well as urban schools, from both the elite and the underfunded. Evening activities included a storytelling competition and a Pageant of Progress about the history of black education in Kentucky that was attended by over 5,000 people. Later conventions often overlapped with those of the Youth Council of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association, creating a truly multigenerational gathering.
The 1936 edition of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association Bulletin featured a recommended “School Improvement Day” program. The model “improvement day” consisted of group singing of “America the Beautiful” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” along with prayers and presentations offered by children and adults on school beautification, the state of black schools, historical figures, and poetry. The conclusion of the day was singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In each instance, when the Negro National Anthem was partnered with patriotic songs and often spirituals, children learned a form of what DuBois would term “double consciousness” that they were both American and black. They were taught to lay claim to American identity notwithstanding segregation and also to cultivate racial pride and a sense of their membership “behind the veil,” as something meaningful and worthy of celebration. The children were also being taught responsibility to their community.
This sense of responsibility and interdependence was part of the purposes of the school beautification program which the journal delineated, stating that the goal was: “To bring the people of the community together at the school house for the purpose of getting better acquainted with each other and to get better acquainted with the school and its needs. . . . To review some of the things being done in the field of Negro Education in Kentucky. . . . To pay homage to the men and women who have given their lives and means that all children might have an elementary education—rural, village and city children alike.”44 And to this end, the article stated, particular appreciation was due Booker T. Washington, and his work with the Jeanes and Rosenwald Funds.
In addition to regular meetings the Kentucky Negro Educational Association Bulletin was published every four months and included educational news and notes. When they gathered, these educators, parents, librarians, and youth sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The ritual was palimpsestic. Their sense of being bound together across the diversity of black experiences in the nation is apparent. They thought of themselves in sophisticated terms and went back to their communities and shared that sensibility with their pupils. They also enlisted children in the practice of building community. Everyone worked to deliberate around the challenges of all types of education. That they sang “Lift Every Voice” at these meetings further deepened the connections. Their singing was a mirror to the charge they undertook not merely to teach the song to children, but to vest it with deep meaning. The ritual singing of “Lift Every Voice” was a training in the development of black formal, civic, and associational culture, a form of teacher training and a form of training the teachers provided their pupils.
For schoolchildren the song stood as an invocation, setting the terms as to how one ought to approach the school day. At graduations and at the conclusion of meetings of professional organizations it also could serve as a benediction. That black formal culture often took on a liturgical structure makes sense given how central church was to black life. But it also indicates that there was a ritual devotion to the art of discipline and achievement in the face of Jim Crow. Mattye Tollette Bond, an educator born in 1895, recalled learning the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at eleven years old. Upon entering Lane College in Tennessee to complete high school, it became a regular ritual in her life: “At our assemblies we all sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ and I was proud to show that I knew every word. We continued to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ through normal school and college. I married, became a teacher, and taught the words of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ to my students. They also proudly sang the Johnsons’ song in our assemblies.”45
One benefit of segregation was that it removed black teachers from the direct oversight of white elites. This enabled students to sing an alternative anthem that was explicitly black. Educators in both public and private schools had greater leeway to develop curricula that spoke directly to the experiences and identities of their students. Teachers sometimes hid pedagogical materials when white philanthropists or school board members came to visit, but during regular school days most children had access to more schooling than the vocational education that the powers-that-be believed was appropriate for them, and to schooling that spoke to their identities as well. Moreover, teachers could instruct the children in ways that deliberately resisted the racial caste system of the society. William Gray, past president of the United Negro College Fund, remembers “Lift Every Voice” as part of this resistance: “One of the few benefits of growing up in the South was that each day in school, we slowly and majestically sang this melodious anthem that was created by one of our poets—a song that promises us that if we keep struggling, we will see the light of freedom because of our faith.”46
While “Lift Every Voice” does sometimes appear in northern and midwestern school programs in the early twentieth century, it was far more common in the South. Martha Smith, who grew up in Willard, Ohio, recalled that “I never heard the song until, as a college student in the 1950s, I journeyed to Talladega College in Alabama. Southern-born blacks probably heard this song from babyhood.”47 And a 1940s migrant from Jackson, Mississippi, to Kansas further captured the particularly southern practice associated with this song: “My mother attended all-black schools—black students, teachers, administrators. Every morning, after pledging allegiance to the flag . . . teachers and students sang the black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’” Years later, when she attended a Martin Luther King rally at which the audience was invited to sing it, she was “surprised and embarrassed to find that few northern blacks knew the song.”48
Likewise, activist-scholar Herb Boyd remembered a boy who migrated from Georgia to his Detroit neighborhood in 1951. The Detroit kids made fun of the migrant’s drawl and gold tooth: “He was the butt of our jokes, until one day he told us stories about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. We thought we were pretty smart but none of us had ever heard of these great men. . . . But Willie wasn’t through. We were sitting around one afternoon, reciting poetry, mostly playing the dozens, when Willie stunned us with a recitation of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ Again he had our attention, and even more so when he sang it. Without knowing it, Willie had given me my first lesson in black studies.”49 Boyd shows that black southern teachers were giving kids “black studies” long before that designation was embraced. And the anthem was an encapsulation of all those lessons. Boyd’s recollection also speaks to the manner in which the complete immersion within community that southern segregation created allowed for “a world within a world” (fragile though it was in the face of racial violence and domination). In this world, a people the nation reviled could cherish themselves and share bodies of knowledge. Although northern cities were often de facto segregated, the absence of a structure in which two distinct systems of social organization existed made such a “world within a world” more elusive and perhaps even seemingly less desirable for residents. The possibility of accessing the larger society held a powerful app
eal. And yet northern black Americans, mostly though not entirely migrants from the South, sustained “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in their own ways.
Without segregated black schools—and their entire infrastructure from principals to superintendents, athletic directors, and teachers associations—northern black children’s access to both “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the broader cultural practice of black formalism was different. It was less likely to be a daily or weekly routine, and more often associated with “bigger” ritual occasions like Emancipation Day services, Negro History Week programs, or the gatherings of civic associations. For those who had access to higher education, attending historically black colleges was another space in which they would experience singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” ritually. While certainly cherished in the North, in some ways the relatively modest world of the song there in the early to mid-twentieth century portended its future diminishment all over the nation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
However, in the early to mid-twentieth-century northern cities, church became the place where northern black youth were most likely to learn the song. Novelist Charles Johnson recalls that he was eight years old in Evanston, Illinois, when he was first introduced to it: “I asked my mother what this particular song was about. ‘Just listen,’ she said gently elbowing me into silence as the choir sang. . . . ‘This,’ she informed me, ‘is the Negro National Anthem.’ This, her tone said, is important. . . . My mother was saying that it was necessary for me to understand this poem if I wanted to grasp something essential about her, my father—and myself.”50 In any instance it was a song of community, of black formalism, and of dignity in identity.
Though he spent the bulk of his twentieth-century career as a full-time musician and composer, Rosamond returned to his early work as an educator when he served as the director of the New York Music School Settlement for Colored Children from 1914 to 1919. Settlement schools were common in the North, but they usually excluded black children. In the North, like the South, even when schools weren’t segregated black adults often had to organize alternative sites in order to provide opportunities for their children that were otherwise denied. And black intellectuals and artists of all sorts were enlisted in these efforts, irrespective of how distinguished they were. The attention to the development of black children was embraced across the board, and though Rosamond spent less time as an educator than James, teaching was an essential part of his legacy. Rosamond and James together published work that was used by educators and civic associations to teach black history and culture. The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926) were compiled by the brothers together. Rosamond independently edited Shoutsongs (1936) and the folksong anthology Rolling Along in Song (1937) and James edited The Book of American Negro Poetry (1938).
One dimension of black associational life was the development of out-of-school learning communities organized by groups of civic-minded adults. The development of a learned print culture for a black public aided these educators, who did their instruction outside of schools as well. The Anna T. Strickland Art Club in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for example, frequently held programs in the late 1920s and early 1930s that combined recitation, speeches, readings, and collective singing of the anthem. Colored Elks Clubs, a network of fraternal mutual aid societies that cropped up across the nation in the early years of the twentieth century, offered college scholarships and held oratorical contests for high school students. Formalism even infused gatherings that were mostly just occasions to have fun. The Baptist Sunday School of Falls Church, Virginia, held its annual picnic at Western View Farm in August 1921. The majority of the pupils motored up in a truck, while others went with their parents and in hay wagons. An illustrated lecture on “Keeping Fit” was given to the boys in the afternoon. Games were indulged in and plenty of ice cream was served free. As a closing feature, all the children gathered in the large outbuilding where a piano was situated and sang the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”51
Hence, when Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), created Negro History Week in 1926, he institutionalized practices that black educators and intellectuals had engaged in for at least two decades. Teachers and community educators who had culled newspapers and searched for books by black authors and on black experience (and even those who had written them) found in Woodson a person who would streamline instruction in black history and expand the production of literature for black children. DuBois, in retrospect, asserted that Woodson’s establishment of Negro History Week was perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of the 1920s renaissance.52 Woodson’s work was influenced by Marcus Garvey’s vociferous celebration of all things black, and it extended the work of the black press, especially that of the Crisis and Opportunity, as well as the work of educators of previous decades. With his initiative, the pattern of naming black schools after black historical figures like Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Toussaint-Louverture was scaffolded by the creation of documents that filled in their stories. As was the case in preceding intellectual and educational work, Black History Week programs articulated identities that were both American and much larger. By “1929 the association was offering for sale reproductions of 160 photos of significant blacks. . . . [Woodson] also produced specialized pamphlets that included bibliographies on various aspects of Negro history and prepared a table of 152 important events and dates in Negro History which sold for 50 cents by the early 1930s.”53 Negro History Week programs included parades with participants dressed as historically significant figures. Negro History Week breakfasts and banquets featured lectures on black history and the recitation of black poetry. Black civic institutions also hosted special exhibitions and presentations during that special week each February.54
While Negro History Week was a special time, Woodson’s Negro History Bulletin served as a resource for daily pedagogical endeavors and general intellectual interest in black life all year round. According to Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “The Bulletin . . . had many functions. Written in a simple language to help black teachers who had little or no knowledge about black history it supplemented “whitestream” American history textbooks of the time and was the vehicle by which schoolteachers and other concerned citizens helped Woodson take black history into the homes of the black masses. . . . It also served as a platform for blacks, from elementary schoolchildren to community activists to schoolteachers to professional scholars, to openly discuss and even publish their thoughts about black history.”55 The Bulletin was the more accessible and livelier companion to Woodson’s more scholarly publication, the Journal of Negro History. Nevertheless, it was serious and well-researched.
In addition to the Bulletin, the ASNLH produced Negro History Week kits that were available by mail order and published juvenile and adult literature to facilitate instruction in black history. One example of a children’s book Woodson wrote and published was African Heroes and Heroines. He dedicated the book to his Uncle George “who in captivity in America manifested the African spirit of resistance to slavery and died fighting the institution.” The book includes chapters on the Ashanti and Dahomey, the conflict in South Africa, East Africa, and one on “the evils against which Africans fight,” a reference to colonialism, along with other essays on African history and culture.
Woodson was not alone in his endeavors to give children access to a complex black world. For example, in 1932 Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps collaborated on the children’s book Popo and Fifina, about two Haitian children who moved from the countryside to a home by the sea. And in 1934 Bontemps published You Can’t Pet a Possum, about a boy in rural Alabama. Woodson was also not the only scholar working to develop a black historical archive. Arturo Schomburg, a Cruzan-German, Puerto Rican–born immigrant, and Marylander John Edward Bruce together founded the Negro Society for Historical Research in 1911. It became the largest archive of A
frican diasporic holdings in the country and is held at what is now called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Woodson, however, distinguished his work with his efforts to institutionalize knowledge, and as such he is often considered the founder or at least the foundation of black studies. Literary scholar Houston Baker revised this common formulation by arguing that Woodson alongside the work that classroom teachers did in segregated schools created black studies. Further, teachers made black studies an exercise that was meaningful both politically and intellectually:
Academically, black studies may be seen as an empiricist outgrowth of the Negro History movement. I mean this only in the sense that the word “study” marks a particular public space in Negro schooling. Whether most of us knew his name or not, Carter G. Woodson was the man we were honoring in those meagerly resourced but nevertheless committed Negro History weeks of our youths. In Louisville—at Virginia Avenue Elementary School—we saw the blackboard décor from last year come out again, and we recited the mantra of Negro contributions to America: from George Washington Carver’s peanuts to Ralph Bunche’s Nobel Prize. Ms. Carter, an aristocratic avatar of nineteenth century Negro Club Women, handled her pitch pipe as though it were the lyre of Orpheus. She led us through the Negro National Anthem, transporting us from the dark blight of what she assumed were our home lives to the light of proud Negro achievement. “Children,” she would intone, “you must never be ashamed of being Negroes!” She instructed us that “Dr. Woodson wants us to be proud of our history.”56