by Imani Perry
Despite the wide gap between the promise and the prospect, at Lafayette Angelou learned and grew. As she approached her eighth grade graduation, Angelou and her classmates were gleeful about their accomplishment. The entire community celebrated with them: “Parents who could afford it had ordered new shoes and ready-made clothes for themselves from Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Ward. They also engaged the best seamstresses to make the floating graduating dresses and to cut down secondhand pants which would be pressed to a military slickness for the important event.”
The formalism of the graduation extended to the smallest of details in preparation. “My class was wearing butter-yellow piqué dresses, and Momma launched out on mine. She smocked the yoke into tiny crisscrossing puckers, then shirred the rest of the bodice. Her dark fingers ducked in and out of the lemony cloth as she embroidered raised daisies around the hem.”82
However, in the midst of their graduation festivities an unexpected white guest arrived and disrupted the ceremony. Mr. Donleavy, a white politician, reminded them from the podium of their lowly status in the society and knocked the wind out of the moment. Angelou responded, “Constrained by hard-learned manners I couldn’t look behind me, but to my left and right the proud graduating class of 1940 had dropped their heads. . . . We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous. . . . The man’s dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled in my belly.”
Mr. Donleavy left abruptly, as soon as his remarks were complete. Angelou marveled that their class valedictorian, Henry Reed, “a small, very black boy with hooded eyes, a long, broad nose and an oddly shaped head,” was nevertheless able to deliver his months-practiced valedictory address without a hitch:
Henry had been a good student in elocution. His voice rose on tides of promise and fell on waves of warnings. The English teacher had helped him to create a sermon winging through Hamlet’s soliloquy. To be a man, a doer, a builder, a leader, or to be a tool, an unfunny joke, a crusher of funky toadstools. I marveled that Henry could go through with the speech as if we had a choice. I had been listening and silently rebutting each sentence with my eyes closed; then there was a hush, which in an audience warns that something unplanned is happening. I looked up and saw Henry Reed, the conservative, the proper, the A student, turn his back to the audience and turn to us (the proud graduating class of 1940) and sing, nearly speaking,
Lift ev’ry voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty . . .
It was the poem written by James Weldon Johnson. It was the music composed by J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the Negro national anthem. Out of habit we were singing it.
Our mothers and fathers stood in the dark hall and joined the hymn of encouragement.
And with that, Henry, the graduates, and their community, restored the beauty of the moment from the assault of white supremacy. “We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. The depths had been icy and dark, but now a bright sun spoke to our souls. I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race.”83
The Negro National Anthem was a tool of transcendence. It was a tool for community-building. It was remembered by Angelou as reflecting the very spirit of black resilience. But in the coming decade the anthem would change. It would twist and turn, its meanings would be transformed with the shifting energies of black political life in the midst of the Second World War and the rise of racial liberalism and McCarthyism.
Chapter Four. The Bell Tolls for Thee
War, Americana, and the Anthem
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
—JULIA HOWE, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.
—MARGARET WALKER, “For My People”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s first public speech was delivered on April 17, 1944, at the state convention of the Colored Elks Clubs held at the First African Baptist Church in Dublin, Georgia. Each local chapter of the Colored Elks sponsored a high school student for the convention’s oratory contest. Young King, representing his father’s chapter, was the winner in 1944. Such contests were a commonplace in the segregated South. They were occasions to revel in the much-celebrated southern oratorical tradition, and for the community to gather to nurture youth. And such contests were also a dimension of black formalism, one of the ritual practices that entailed certain expectations of grace, dignity, elegant execution and appearance, and an audience that was attentive and appropriate. That fall the gifted fifteen-year-old would matriculate at Morehouse College in Atlanta, another one of the many sites of his life in which black formalism would be both expected and nurtured.
King’s speech topic was “The Negro and the Constitution.” It was both patriotic and critical. He asserted that if black Americans were given the vote, “they will be vigilant and defend, even with their arms, the ark of federal liberty from treason and destruction by her enemies.” And yet, he was also damning of America’s refusal to recognize the earned citizenship of black people, saying, “Yes, America you have stripped me of my garments, you have robbed me of my precious endowment.”
In the midst of the speech there is a subtle reference to “Lift Every Voice”: “On January 1, 1863 the proclamation emancipating the slaves which had been decreed by President Lincoln in September took effect—millions of Negroes faced a rising sun of a new day begun.” King had likely attended many Emancipation Day ceremonies, assemblies, and services in his young life where the community sang “Lift Every Voice,” and he had joined with schoolmates and other community members in its collective meditation on the promise of freedom, and its persistent denial. It would become evident over his career that it was one of the foundational “texts” to which he would return repeatedly in his sermons. In this regard the anthem for Martin Luther King Jr. was like Bible verses or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was part of his sermonic archive and used to add texture and emphasis. Here it signified the glorious promise of emancipation. Next he turned to the deferral of true liberty: “America gave its full pledge of freedom seventy-five years ago. Slavery has been a strange paradox in a nation founded on the principles that all men are created free and equal. Finally after tumult and war, the nation in 1865 took a new stand—freedom for all people. The new order was backed by amendments to the national constitution making it the fundamental law that thenceforth there should be no discrimination anywhere in the ‘land of the free’ on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. . . . Black America still wears chains.”
King spoke as the United States was fighting a war against Nazi Germany and the rise of fascism. African Americans, in the midst of the war effort, often reminded their countrypeople that their loyalty to the nation yet and still far exceeded the nation’s to them: “So as we gird ourselves to defend democracy from foreign attack, let us see to it that increasingly at home we give fair play and free opportunity for all people.”
African Americans overwhelmingly supported the wartime effort, notwithstanding the hypocrisy of the United States fighting fascism abroad while Jim Crow flourished at home. Fascism was familiar to a people who had been enslaved, Jim Crowed, and murdered with impunity. Antifascism was an obvious position for them to hold. And yet they also were in a position, in the midst of World War II, to insist that the U.S. government address domestic fascism against African Americans and Japanese Americans, as well as the fore
ign policy that supported colonial domination of the black world.
In the mainstream of American politics, a new vision of American racial liberalism emerged in response to fascism abroad, one that supported racial equality as a formal matter but resisted criticisms of imperialism or economic exploitation. King’s adolescent blending of the Negro National Anthem, an antifascist sentiment, and an argument for the actualization of the promises of Reconstruction encapsulated how many black Americans engaged with the idea of racial liberalism. Eventually, in order to build an interest convergence between the federal government and black aspirations for full citizenship, some members of the black leadership class abandoned international alliances with anticolonialists in Asian, Africa, and the Caribbean. But in the 1930s and early 1940s we see a more inchoate blend of patriotism and racial advocacy from a varying range of black artists, political figures, and regular folks. And we also see a dynamic relationship between this argument for inclusion, and the American government’s growing racial liberalism, which had as an undercurrent strong anticommunist politics and real anxieties about the appeal of radical leftist politics to some sectors of the black American population.
Inklings of this dynamic began in the late 1930s. In particular, the mass media became a vehicle for the promotion of racial liberalism. Public radio broadcasts of that era reveal the shift toward racial liberalism, with a number of features focused upon black history and culture. Historian Barbara Savage attributes much of these to Ambrose Caliver, a Virginia native with degrees from Knoxville College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University who had served as a high school teacher and as a dean at Fisk University before being appointed to the position of “senior specialist in Education of Negroes” in the Federal Office of Education.1 Later, during FDR’s first term, Caliver became a member of FDR’s famous “Black Cabinet.” In addition to Caliver’s extensive documentation of educational disparities and challenges for African American people, he used radio broadcasts to advocate for educational equity. This included an annual “national radio broadcast on African American education during American Education week” through the 1930s and the broadcast of Eleanor Roosevelt’s keynote address at the National Conference on Fundamental Problems in the Education of the Negro in 1934.2
To place issues facing black youth in the mass media was a significant transition. But the depictions weren’t always as racially progressive as they were likely intended to be. In 1938 a segment on “The Negro” was prepared as part of the CBS series Americans All. Belatedly, W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke were invited to comment on the script, and they found a show filled with offensive plantation stereotypes. After their vociferous objections, the script was revised to include a history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and a performance of “Lift Every Voice” in order to restore some dignity in representation.
That “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became part of the “representation” politics of mass culture indicates how invested black Americans, in the midst of World War II, were in presenting black formalism as the public “face” of the black community. Those rituals and codes became part of the argument against the racial stereotypes featured on film and radio, and part of how the rise of racial liberalism enabled black participation in the representation of black people.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” became part of the politics of representation in local broadcasts as well as national ones. In Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1940, a local station, WMAL, featured a series of educational programs performed by the pupils of the Garnet-Patterson School with the cooperation of NBC. For the March 7 program, they presented a creative mix of classical traditions. The broadcast began with the students paying an imaginary visit to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, followed by a recitation of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” against the backdrop of music by Oscar Rasbach. Another group recited Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. Finally, the children discussed the lives of celebrated black writers: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. The Garnet-Patterson School Glee Club finished the program by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”3 This was yet another public display of the traditions of black formalism, intended for mainstream consumption. And for the white public, this broadcast also integrated black people into representations of literature and art with which whites were widely familiar, representations that were deemed “worthy” and classical. This was something new for the American mainstream. There were, of course, long-standing white audiences for black art, but this display of the cosmopolitanism of black school culture was distinct and it portended a broader integration of black people into the American popular media and imagination.
Then in 1941 and 1942, with the war around the corner, Ambrose Caliver produced a nine-part radio documentary titled Freedom’s People that featured black achievement in science, history, music, and athletics. “A stellar display and a stealthy deployment of black culture itself,” Savage writes, “Freedom’s People made a compelling political argument for equal opportunity and racial justice on a medium that had appropriated and exploited that culture and on a show that was sponsored by a primary target of black protests: the federal government.”4 The opening medley for the series included bits of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and “Go Down, Moses.” Over the course of the series, performances by Count Basie, Paul Robeson, and the choirs of Tuskegee, Howard, and Fisk Universities were used to tell the story of African Americans. The final episode explicitly appealed for an end to segregation.5
The blending of Americana and the Black National Anthem was an indication of the argument for racial inclusion being made by African Americans. And at the same time, American patriotism was central to building support for the war effort. Racial representation became a means for claiming fidelity to and membership in the United States at once.
Local broadcasts also revealed the analogy that was increasingly being drawn by black activists between antifascism abroad and antiracism at home. In a 1944 Washington, D.C., radio broadcast sponsored by the Negro Publishers Association, “the Negro Press threw out a challenge to America to the effect that it was all out to save democracy, but that it wanted it definitely understood that the Negro Press would not be content until every citizen of America was given the rights to which the term democracy applies.” The program was broadcast in the cherished month of February (when Negro History Week and the birthdays of Lincoln and Douglass were all celebrated). Thurman L. Dodson offered a tribute to the black press and asserted that they had been demanding on issues of racial justice while remaining patriotic. As part of this broadcast, the chorus of the Juvenile Police Project sang a song titled “We Are Americans, Too,” a wartime anthem written by Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf and published by W. C. Handy.
“We Are Americans, Too” is about black participation in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War I, although like “Lift Every Voice” it never explicitly mentions race. The refrain is nevertheless a demand for full citizenship:
Somewhere out there in the parade
Loudly, proudly and undismayed
We’ll be singing this song many millions strong
We are Americans, loyal Americans
We are Americans, too.
This was followed by a coloratura soprano, Madame Lillian Evanti, singing the melancholy “Birdsongs at Eventide.”6 The program concluded with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The black press celebrated in this program was essential to black political life, and the Pittsburgh Courier, arguably the most nationally significant Negro newspaper of the time, had mounted one of the most significant wartime initiatives in support of racial equality. It was called the Double V campaign, standing for Victory against fascism abroad and Victory against racism in the United States. The campaign was inspired by a letter to the editor from James Thompson, a Wichita, Kansas, reader, that said in part,
I suggest that while we keep defense and victory in the forefront that w
e don’t lose sight of our fight for true democracy at home. The “V for Victory” sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny. If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict then let colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeing to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.7
The black press, while supporting the war effort, also reported on segregation and racial inequality across the nation and in the armed forces. As a result, the U.S. military banned black newspapers from its libraries or confiscated and burned them when soldiers got ahold of them. The federal government might have been pursuing a public commitment to racial liberalism, but it wanted to keep a tight hold on troop loyalty. However, the prohibition against black newspapers didn’t prevent black soldiers from covertly circulating them, and the double V campaign significantly boosted the domestic circulation of black newspapers.
The doubleness of purpose that characterized black wartime politics shaped black ceremonial and ritual practices associated with black formalism as well. Graduation ceremonies of black schools in the early 1940s consistently placed patriotic anthems such as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” alongside “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And in 1943, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), a civil rights advocacy group, named its conference after the song “We Are Americans, Too,” which captured the Double V sentiment.