by Imani Perry
The practice of black consciousness-raising urged a reconnection with African continental culture, and Pan-Africanist solidarity. The forward-looking imagination, to a different state, was rooted in a remix of traditions and an explicit rejection of the false hope of integration. So now when black people gathered to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” they did so in bell bottoms, with large afros and fists raised in the sign of black power. They moved from black formalism to insistent demands for black liberation.
On February 23, 1973, the newsletter of the Oakland branch of the Black Panther Party announced a play performed by the elementary school the party had recently founded: The Inter-communal Youth Institute. The program was held in honor of Chairman Huey P. Newton. It was also a celebration of what had recently become Black History Month (rather than Negro History Week).20 This was their third special program of the year. The children, aged two to eleven, began the program by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” now designated the Black (rather than Negro) National Anthem. Next the Youth Band, directed by Brother Charles Moffett—an accomplished free jazz drummer who often worked with such distinguished contemporaries as Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, and Pharaoh Saunders—followed with three selections: “Skin Tight,” “Peace on Earth,” and “Caravan,” played in honor of the late jazz great Duke Ellington. After the musical performances, Institute students Nyota Archibald and Valerie Wilson read selections from The Insights of Huey P. Newton. Interspersed throughout the program were songs from Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff’s soundtrack to the movie in which he starred, The Harder They Come. The Harder They Come was a cult classic for activists inspired by Cliff’s portrayal of Ivan, aka Rhygin, the hero of the film who begins his life in the countryside and after his mother’s death migrates to the big city of Kingston. Rhygin tries to make a respectable living at first but finds himself becoming a glorious outlaw.
In this period, elements of the classical tradition that were once de rigueur for black formalist performance spaces were traded in for variations upon the theme of unapologetic blackness in all of its diversity and complexity. “We Shall Overcome” seemed naive and even insipid in comparison to the reach for soul and the deliberate invocation of the African continent and diaspora. An example of this is found in the work of James Thomas Jackson, a Temple, Texas, native who became a poet in the Watts Writers Workshop. He published a piece in the early 1970s titled “Daybreak.” It riffs on both Langston Hughes’s poem “Daybreak in Alabama” and Sam and Dave’s song “Hold On!,” which has the boisterous energy of the contemporary social movement. In the poem he expresses his disaffection with “We Shall Overcome”:
I’m tired.
That weary old song . . .
“We shall overcome . . . “
Has no fascination for me,
Hell no, I didn’t like the damn thing
In the first place
I’m writing some brand new
Lyrics for it as of right now
So you can remember and
The words are:
“Hold on, I’m coming, hold on, I’m coming . . . “
And I am too!21
In contrast to “We Shall Overcome,” Jackson remembered “Lift Every Voice and Sing” fondly:
I was first introduced to their work by my high school music teacher, who was a beautiful black rebel in her own right. She had us sing the Johnson brothers hymn—The Negro National Anthem—“Lift Every Voice and Sing” before “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She did that, that is, if none of the white faculty members were present. She tried to get us to sing it softly if she thought they were anywhere near, but her efforts always failed terribly.
Francis Scott Key’s lyrics were all right with us, but not in the same league with the Johnson Brothers’ soul-ensnaring bombast:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun, of our new day begun,
Let us march on, til victory—is won.
After we had put our voices into that with fervor, there was never a dry eye in the classroom.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was commensurable with the turn to black power and black consciousness in a way that “We Shall Overcome” was not. Part of its insurgent appeal had to do with the conditions under which it had been written and first shared. It was a song that resisted the dominant society’s depiction and treatment of black Americans. It was a song of fortitude not hope, and the intimacy of black community rather than the dashed dream of interracial unity through integration. A graduate of the segregated Dunbar School in Tucson, Arizona, remembered the loss of the song as one of the painful costs of integration:
Instead of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” we would sing the Negro National Anthem. And they thought that that was not the thing to do. So, when White people came, we would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I talked to my friends. It was done all over the country. At segregated schools they would sing the Negro National Anthem. I know the words to the Negro National Anthem, but I do not know the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” So, we would all sing the Negro National Anthem. The superintendent did not like that at all. . . . When the schools became integrated, we said we would no longer sing the Black National Anthem. We stopped singing it when the schools became integrated.22
Partly because there was a sharp sense that too much had been lost and too little gained with desegregation, renewed energy was focused upon the task of nurturing young black people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The networks were not as robust as they had been during Jim Crow. Black people had a much wider range of professions available to them as access to college increased and businesses and professions stepped away from Jim Crow practices. No longer were they limited to black institutions in pursuing their careers. But more than that, associational life diminished for Americans generally during the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural revolution ripped asunder the traditional intergenerational transfer of habits and memberships. Rather quickly though, even the rebelling youth understood changes that seemed necessary weren’t all good. And there were still important efforts to reimagine black associations and institutions especially given that school integration had failed badly. Adelaide Cromwell, a scion of Boston black elites, whom she would later term “the other Brahmins,”23 drew on resources from the past to articulate the needs of black children within the context of the black nationalist politics in the 1970s. Cromwell argued that black people ought to revive the ethos of institutions like the Dunbar School of Washington, D.C. And, anticipating the criticism of Dunbar as bourgeois, she wrote that Dunbar was not a factory for the creation of “Uncle Toms,” despite what some might surmise. Rather, Cromwell wrote, Dunbar was unapologetically black: “There were no ‘Black Studies’ for in a sense there was no real need for Black Studies. Well-trained black teachers taught the subjects in ways black students with proper education understood. The black experience in terms of persons and content was ever present. All students knew and sang, with regularity and more feeling than the manner in which they saluted the American flag, ‘The Negro National Anthem.’”24 The anthem was, according to Cromwell, a sign of black nationalist sensibilities in this most elite of black schools. “Black teachers in Black schools can teach and develop superior black students” more effectively than other teachers in other contexts, she argued, making her skepticism regarding integration clear and unflinching. As a Dunbar graduate, she had good reason to be skeptical. By 1973, when Cromwell’s essay was published, Dunbar had been integrated and almost wholly evacuated of its impressive tradition. Following desegregation, the demolition of the original facility, and, with the upheaval, the loss of the traditional school culture, Dunbar’s prestige dropped notably. Through the 1980s, Dunbar High School continued to perform below the standards. But the losses of desegregation were already being acutely felt in the early 1970s.
It just felt so good. I felt like I was returning to my roots. I felt like integration had been forced upon me and now that I was able to choose what school I could go to I was going to choose to return back to my community where I knew that academics would be stressed in a totally different kind of way. Learning would be received and taken in a very different kind of way. Black schools have such rich heritages. They have such bonds, such togetherness, such—the activities, the bands, the choruses, the football. I wanted to return to that whole feeling. . . . The proudest I ever was of my Dad, at a high school assembly for Black History Week, those assemblies always started with the singing of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” When he stood there and raised his fist along with all the rest of the black students, I just really got a chill. I was just very emotional because he showed that he was with us and he understood what we were going through. He looked just like the guys at the Olympics that first raised their fists when the National Anthem was being played. That was a very memorable moment for my dad sharing with the black community.25
Peerman’s nostalgia, and that of many others who integrated white institutions, was pointed. It was not only for the warm communities they left but for a space where the intransigence of white America on the question of true integration wasn’t felt in every moment of one’s educational life. They longed for a time when they didn’t attend schools where as a black student you could only be a visitor, not a member. Their yearning was for a place to belong again.
That Peerman mentions “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” then, isn’t surprising. It was a song of membership and community. And it seemed that full membership in what it meant to be American hadn’t been fully granted, despite the difficult civil rights struggle, and even after black people had let go of so many of the institutions in which their membership had been deep and meaningful in order to pursue that ever-elusive vision of integration.
In light of the disappointing transition to technically integrated schools—ones that allowed black pupils but also ones that white students fled, ones without black teachers and principals, athletic directors, and choir directors, ones that had black populations but could not be described as black schools in the tradition of black education—some black activists and educators tried to teach the white adults who increasingly taught black youth how to engage with them in a culturally appropriate manner. A 1972 article titled “More ‘Soul’ Needed in White Teachers,” Kenneth Fish begins with the voices of black children: “It seems that some dig black people, but others—they’re just prejudiced.” After several additional examples, Fish summarizes:
The foregoing quotes of black youths show that there are different kinds of white teachers in their world: a few who are empathetic and aware, but more who seem insensitive, hostile or indifferent. . . . The responsibility to appreciate the personal strengths of black people and to interpret the positive values of their society to the white majority is an awesome one. This is a task that must be undertaken by all who are in a position to do so, including America’s teachers. . . . For starters, how many readers of this article would recognize the song title, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”? If this is less familiar than “God Save the King” or “The Marseillaise” then something is seriously wrong. How odd that one should recognize the national anthems of European nations more readily than the song known by 20 million of our fellow Americans as “the Negro National Anthem.”26
While the recommendation to acquire some knowledge about the culture of one’s pupils was undoubtedly a good one, such lessons could not lead to a restoration of the contexts in which “Lift Every Voice and Sing” had its greatest impact. Diversity additions to curricula and cultural awareness lessons are not the same thing as cultivated school cultures and rituals. They don’t take root or inspire in the same way. But some new schools with explicit black consciousness philosophies sought to rebuild the kind of school cultures that were destabilized and even destroyed with desegregation. At the Nairobi Day School in East Palo Alto, California, the educators were concerned with making sure their white volunteers had a culturally appropriate approach to black children, but they were also dedicated more broadly to building a school culture that nurtured the identity and honored the traditions of black American youth. The “Nairobi Method” developed out of the workshops that had been led by the school’s founders to orient and train its volunteer tutors, most of whom were European Americans with no previous experience teaching African American youth. . . . During the attitude workshops it was made clear to tutors that they were required to have “high expectations and a nonpatronizing attitude toward Nairobi Day School’s predominantly African American students.”27 The workshops sought to instantiate what was standard practice for black teachers in the segregated South—believing in the ability and possibilities of black children—in all faculty, black and white.
The Nairobi Day School was one example of how even as many black schools were closed others were founded that blended the current political moment with older traditions. Established in 1966, Nairobi was an example of the community school movement that emerged from black nationalist thought and the philosophy of black consciousness. Mary Rhodes Hoover, a teacher at Nairobi whose husband was its founder, described the school’s beginnings: “On the first day of school in 1966, founders of the day school expected a handful of high school students and tutors. However, approximately 200 students (mostly elementary) and 200 tutors arrived! Saturday morning and Wednesday evening classes were held until 1969, when Nairobi Day School became a full time school in conjunction with its Saturday school.”28 In the first couple of years Stokely Carmichael, who had transitioned from being a leader of SNCC to brief membership in the Black Panther Party before moving to Guinea, came to visit the students frequently. Contrary to mainstream media depictions of Carmichael as terrifyingly militant and violent, he showed to the Nairobi students a great tenderness that many who knew him recalled. He preached a doctrine of self-love to them, saying on one occasion, “Before you learn to read and write and learn mathematics and chemistry you’ve got to learn to love yourself . . . because if you don’t love yourself you won’t want to learn about mathematics and chemistry.”29
The daily program of the Nairobi Day School was described as follows: “At the Day School we use the assembly for motivation. Assembly begins with the singing of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ . . . We continue with motivational songs, many of which are old familiar hymn tunes and spirituals with new words to stimulate the student in developing a positive attitude . . . ‘I’m a Learning Man’ ‘Good News! Freedom’s Coming!’” The teachers encouraged respect for black vernacular language and used rhyming poems based in African and African American history to support literacy skills. One in particular captured the political moment rather dramatically:
Genocide
Genocide, Genocide
A hundred million Black folks died.
Imhotep
Imhotep
Built the pyramids, step by step.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Malcolm X
Read so much he needed specs . . .
Loved his people, loved the Blacks
Taught us how to speak up loud
Taught us how to stand up proud . . .30
This blend of tradition and the new radicalism emerged out of the initiative of a native North Carolinian, Robert Hoover, who had traveled west for graduate studies at Stanford. With his wife, Mary, as his professional and intellectual partner, Hoover founded both Nairobi Day school and Nairobi College, although the two schools were independent from one another. The story of Nairobi
College is like that of the day school, a study in black nationalism, black consciousness, and a renewed commitment to black institutional life and rituals.
The College of San Mateo, a public junior college, first hired Robert Hoover to recruit minority students. His program served over 500 students and sent over fifty students to four-year colleges in two years. But when a new president came to San Mateo two years into Hoover’s tenure, he slashed funding for the program. The students responded by accusing the administration of racial discrimination. Campus protests resulted in conflicts with local police. Hoover was fired, and many of his students quit in protest. But he had a plan. With $80,000 raised from private sources, Robert and Mary Hoover and a handful of others opened Nairobi College in an East Palo Alto five-room frame house. By 1969, a year after it opened, Nairobi was accredited as a junior college with over 100 students taking classes in houses around the area taught by a volunteer faculty drawn from neighboring institutions. None of the instructors received a salary. The curriculum was standard in some ways and radical in others. Classes included black English, which was taught as a sociolinguistic course and imparted knowledge about the unique phonology and syntax of African American vernacular speech. Students could also take courses in Swahili, black psychology, leadership development, and political awareness. Communications courses included Shakespeare and comparative mythology.31 Students over eighteen were admitted to Nairobi College without regard to their academic records and, consistent with the school’s radical democratic philosophy, students were involved in institutional decision making. By 1972, the college served 300 students, whose average age was twenty-five. The tuition was $600, but 95 percent of students received financial aid.32 Orde Coombs, a freelance writer, described his experience visiting Nairobi in 1972 for an all-college meeting. Before things began, “Stokely Carmichael, dark glasses on his handsome face, comes through the door.” Carmichael milled about with students before the program began.