by Imani Perry
In Baker’s estimation the song, under the direction of teachers, served not only to teach history but also to develop racial pride in students, a pride that contradicted a world that would diminish them.
For the 1929 celebration of Negro History Week at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia, the seniors decorated the chapel with pennants of black colleges: Atlanta University, Lincoln, Howard, Paine College, Morehouse College, and Walker Baptist. Haines was a private day school founded in 1883, and by 1929 it served over 900 students. The Monday program featured the first-year class presenting on black pioneers, with particular focus on the black sailors who accompanied Christopher Columbus and on black explorer Matthew Henson. On Tuesday, the second-year class spoke about the “Negro in Business,” with a focus on black-owned insurance companies. On Wednesday, the juniors delivered a program on literature and art in which they discussed Rosamond Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Meta Warrick, and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. The Thursday program on black education was presented by the seniors and focused on their founder, Lucy Laney, as well as Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Mary McLeod Bethune.57 The Haines Institute was a cultural center of sorts and therefore this event was likely enjoyed by the entire community and not just the pupils. Concerts, public lectures by nationally renowned speakers, and a variety of social events were held there. Lucy Laney, its founder, was a member of the active and well-connected black intelligentsia of the early twentieth century. She was also a founding member of the local chapter of the NAACP and was active in both the NACW and the YMCA and YWCA. Laney had founded both the first black kindergarten in Augusta and the first nursing program for black women in Augusta, in addition to building her own school.
The seniors who focused their Negro History Week program on education chose not simply three prominent black women but women who were deeply connected to each other through the networks of black politics, civic culture, and education. Mary McLeod Bethune had taught at Haines Institute before starting her own school. She had learned under the tutelage of Lucy Laney and adopted Laney’s philosophy about the importance of educating girls for the betterment of the entire community. She recalled that she “was so impressed with [Laney’s] fearlessness, her amazing touch in every respect, an energy that seemed inexhaustible and her mighty power to command respect and admiration from her students and all who knew her. She handled her domain with the art of a master.” Bethune, who rose to great heights as the first female president of the NATCS, the president and founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and one of the only black advisers to the Roosevelt administration, ventured out from under the wing of Laney to build her own school in 1904. She rented a house for eleven dollars a month. The student benches and desks were fashioned from discarded crates. Teachers and parents raised funds for the school by selling fried fish plates, sweet potato pies, and ice cream. Theologian and political leader Howard Thurman described the pride the entire black community of Daytona took in Bethune’s school:
As a boy growing up in Daytona, I was of course familiar with how Mary McLeod Bethune started her school and I knew the mission she was fulfilling. . . . In that first decade of the century, Mrs. Bethune provided a unique leadership, involved in all the problems of Negro life in town, and at times she was the spokesperson on behalf of the entire Negro community. We attended commencement services at the school whenever Mamma would take us. They inspired me, even though it was a girls school . . . the very presence of the school, and the inner strength and authority of Mrs. Bethune gave boys like me a view of possibilities to be realized in some distance future.58
Charlotte Hawkins Brown was also a mentee of Laney’s. Born in Henderson, North Carolina, she was reared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she met Alice Freeman Palmer, the second president of Wellesley College, who became a benefactor and assisted Brown in her pursuit of higher education. Brown recalled “the face of the black woman, Lucy Laney, thrown upon the canvas one night in a Cambridge church and a white man’s description of her achievement in spite of her color determined my career as an educator and builder.”59 Brown, like Bethune, studied Laney’s methods for a year. In 1905, when Brown opened her school, she named it after Palmer but built it in the tradition of Laney. The Palmer Memorial Institute became a distinguished college preparatory school program learned from her mentor. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was its official school song, a mark of excellence and unapologetic blackness.
These three educators, connected to each other as members of the NACW’s southern branch, as members of the NATCS, and as people who had worked together and who shared educational missions, reveal the layered richness and mutual as well as community and institutional benefits of black associational life. Their examples also signify something that has probably already occurred to readers. Although the composers were men, the leaders and educators who imparted the anthem, and the formal culture in which it sat, were mostly women. This point is particularly important given how, as future chapters will explore, black formalism provided the foundation for the freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century. It was the foundation of the struggle. The seniors at Haines Normal Institute understood the foundation their growth relied upon, forged by three distinguished black women educators, and in turn celebrated it with their community, references to their history, and by repeatedly singing the Negro National Anthem over the course of Negro History Week in 1929. Indeed, the song almost functioned as a foundation out of which stories of individual greatness, woven together in the fabric of community, might emerge as both distinct and part of the whole in which everyone could take pride.
There are a plethora of such stories of intertwined missions and legacies, and of excellent segregated black schools. Atlanta University, long considered the premier black institution of classical education in Georgia, ran a laboratory school in the 1930s and early 1940s. Other black colleges ran laboratory schools in this period as well, including Virginia State University, Alabama State University, and Tuskegee Institute and Talladega College, also both in Alabama. Among the pupils of the Atlanta Laboratory School were Martin Luther King Jr. and his sister Christine. Consistent with the principles of the laboratory school movement founded by John Dewey at the University of Chicago, “the curricula consisted of a unified and social problems core (with, seemingly, no preplanned structure core in the upper levels). No grades were assigned as the staff incorporated narrative assessments. With a staff of 11 teachers for a 200-student enrollment in grades 7–12, the Lab School was a true experimental school site.”60
Elizabeth Garlington, who also attended the Atlanta Laboratory School, recalls that in the 1920s, “before this magnificent song, we sang songs like ‘John Brown’s Body’ or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ These were abolitionist songs. But “Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was by a black person. It was written out of the experiences and hardships of black people and it’s a beautiful song because it raises our hopes and dreams.”61
Ironically, the author of the poetic rendering of “John Brown’s Body” (as opposed to the popular nineteenth-century song), Stephen Vincent Benét, called for a “black-skinned epic” to coexist with his ode, feeling that he hadn’t captured the spirit of black people adequately in his own work. Apparently he wasn’t aware that one already existed as part of a fabric of community. This isn’t altogether surprising, since black civic life was out of view for the vast majority of white Americans.
But that civic life was vibrant. Negro History Week was not simply for students and their families. It provided an opportunity for the entire community to be educated and celebrate. Nettie Asberry, chair of the History Department of the State Federation of Women in Washington, reported in 1930 that in Washington state “Negro History Week was generally observed throughout the state. . . . In Tacoma perhaps the biggest demonstration was made.” At the AME church, organized by members of the booklovers club, they began with “Lifting as We Climb,” then heard papers on Frederick Douglass, “the Negro
in Literature,” and “the Negro in History.” Interspersed between these papers were spirituals and songs from black composers Harry Burleigh and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. The event concluded with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”62
The resources advertised and shared in the Negro History Bulletin could be put to direct use in such programs. The October 1, 1938, issue of the Negro History Bulletin includes a book review of The Family by Evangeline E. Harris, a teacher in the Lincoln School of Terre Haute, Indiana, with illustrations by M. Mikel Williams. Harris’s book includes fictional stories and accounts of the lives of Booker T. Washington and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and it concludes with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The review is partially critical, observing that the book should be larger and more detailed, but it recognizes that The Family is nevertheless “skillful.”63
The May 1941 issue of the Bulletin features a pantomime written by Ruth White Willis, secretary and member of the National Housewives League in Baltimore. She titled her work “Let Our Rejoicings Rise,” after a phrase in the anthem. Her pantomime tells the history of the Negro from the dawn of time to the present, much like earlier pageants, but Willis’s is written specifically to be performed by schoolchildren. It begins with a character referred to as “Mr. Ages” softly humming “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The first child comments: “How beautiful you sing our new song.” The second child says, “But when did you learn our new song? We just learned it today in school for Negro History Week.” Mr. Ages responds, “‘Tis a new song indeed. But the thought is old, as old as the dawn of civilization.” Willis puts in the words of Mr. Ages a statement about the universal aspirations present in the Negro anthem. He refers to it as “our new song” and at the same time acknowledges that it is a timeless work specifically born of black experience.
The pantomime continues:
THIRD CHILD: How can that be? It is the “Negro National Anthem,” it has been written only since the freedom of the Negro in the United States.
FOURTH CHILD: How can the thought of the “Negro National Anthem” be as old as civilization or history, when the Negro has no history except that which deals with the period of slavery in the United States?
Mr. Ages disabuses the children of this misconception. He opens the “book of Negro history” in his hands and begins with the story of Ikhnaton (Akhenaton), the founder of monotheism, and asserts that “Egypt is in Africa.” After his presentation the second child says, “Think of it. The Negroes a great people—Pharaoh’s ruling a vast territory—capturing and enslaving weaker races and giving to the world its first civilization.” Then Mr. Ages turns to Ethiopia, Nubia, and Meroe, before discussing Africans landing at Jamestown in 1619, and the black people who served on Spanish expeditions to the New World. He describes great black thinkers of Europe: Alexandre Dumas, Angelo Solimon, and Samuel Coleridge Taylor, before asking the children to reflect on “current Negro people of Achievement”: Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Dorothy Manor, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, George Washington Carver, “and many others who make us ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’” They conclude the pantomime by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”64
The task of ensuring that black children understood that slavery was not the sum total of their ancestry was not only an effort at historical accuracy but an attempt to explicitly countervail conceptions of inferiority that threatened to fester in a society in which black people were subjugated at every turn. Harvard professor Martin Kilson recalled that in his segregated Pennsylvania elementary school “there were two black teachers, Mrs. Helen Perry Moore and Mrs. Evelyn Brown Wright. Mrs. Moore, who ran the Penllyn Elementary School, preached a get-up-and-go ethos to black children and used our freedom anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ to communicate this ethos at the school-year opening ceremony, on Armistice Day, on Lincoln’s birthday and during Negro History Week.”65 Kilson also remembered singing “Lift Every Voice” at the conclusion of segregated Boy Scout meetings in his community. It was both an in-school and out-of-school educational practice, one that inculcated high self-regard and collective pride as well as a sense of history.
In the November 1, 1948, issue of the Negro History Bulletin, the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice” were published with a description of how the anthem ought to be used pedagogically, written by Muriel Wellington, a resident of Boston.
1. Purpose: To acquaint all schoolchildren with the knowledge of the Anthem; and to give Negro children a sense of race pride. To make the hymn a song that all children recognize and know how to sing.
2. Motivation:
1. Tell the story of James Weldon Johnson
2. Tell appropriate slave stories in conjunction with stories about contemporary Negro heroes that all children know about.
Ex. a. Harriet Tubman b. Lena Horne
3. Play the music for appreciation of rhythm and tune
4. Show pictures of
a. Slaves
b. The Working Negro
c. The Negro in church
d. The Negro in business
e. The Negro on the farm
f. The Negro at home.66
Wellington goes on to suggest that teachers have students study the words and their meanings (e.g., “harmonies” and “rejoicing”) in addition to contemplating the repetition of phrases and providing explanation of their meaning. She recommends that pupils dramatize elements of the song, as well as draw and sculpt (out of clay) aspects of its story. At the conclusion of the article she states that by the end of these exercises students should know the song, and moreover that we all should know the words clearly: “The Negro Anthem should have a place on all planned programs because of its beauty and because it is representative of our children.” Wellington’s lesson was what today would be referred to as a thematic curriculum. Through the theme of the song, children would learn about music, social and economic history, and culture.
Longtime clubwoman and civil rights activist Dorothy Height described the pedagogical lesson that was central to how she learned the anthem as a member of the Harlem Christian Youth Council. For Height it was an occasion for meditation and political awakening. “We read it aloud together, then shared our sense of its meaning. Once we sang it, it became our own. We sang the third stanza prayerfully, feeling one another’s sense of struggle and hope. To this day, I find it hard to sing just one stanza. The words and melody linger on.”67
James Weldon Johnson died in a 1938 car accident in Maine after an illustrious career. For the final eight years of his life, he served as the Spence Chair of Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. This endowed chair was created specifically for Johnson, in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments. In the middle of his tenure there, he taught for a year at New York University, thus serving as its first black professor. As a professor he taught literature, American law, and music. By the time of his death, he had already joined the ranks of black heroic figures students learned about during Negro History Week. After his demise, Augusta Savage immediately set about sculpting a bust of him.
Johnson’s widow, Grace, a notoriously persnickety woman, was not pleased with Savage’s work. So she purchased it and kept it from public display for decades. James’s niece, Rosamond’s daughter, Mildred Johnson Edwards, would honor his legacy otherwise, however. She had already followed in her father’s and uncle’s footsteps as an educator, founding the Modern School in Harlem in 1934 and Summer Camp Dunroven in Pine Bush, New York, in 1933, both intended to primarily serve African American young people. Education was a family tradition, as was the Negro National Anthem. Mildred recalled, “At the time when I was born, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was well into its ‘early adolescence.’ In our home the song was a living entity—you could say that it was, for me, an older sibling. My parents’ friends and colleagues would seldom allow an evening of social activities or en salon to end without my father J. Rosamond Johnson, playing the piano and letting them show off their harmonizing on ‘Li
ft Every Voice and Sing.’”68
The Modern School blended the formalism of the black institutional culture of the South (Mildred was born in Jacksonville) with the pedagogical lessons she learned in the teacher training program of the elite, predominantly white Fieldston School in New York. She wrote, “I founded the Modern School, a progressive experiment in secular elementary school education for local youngsters. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was used for all official school functions and assembly. It was apparent that the song would be of great help as we strove to foster a sense of heritage and pride for the primarily African American pupils who relied on us for development and support.”69 What the Modern School accomplished in New York, or the Dunbar School in Washington, D.C., or the Haines, Lincoln, and Palmer Institutes down south—that is, provide a superior education rivaling the best in the nation—reflected a widely held aspiration for black families and their children.
Despite the noble efforts to build schools, and the extraordinary achievement in some of them, it was clear by the 1940s that there still simply weren’t enough schools for black children. But the momentum for education meant that even when there wasn’t enough for black children (food, resources, access, schools), they nevertheless participated in an educationally aspirational community. Congresswoman Maxine Waters recalls how at the James Weldon Johnson Elementary School she attended in St. Louis, “I sang the Negro National Anthem when I was hungry—I sang the Negro National Anthem when my tooth was hurting because of an exposed cavity—I sang the Negro National Anthem when I did not know there was a future for a little black girl with twelve sisters and brothers.”70