by Imani Perry
The mistress of ceremonies is listed as Sister Denise Armstrong, and she asks everyone to stand and sing the black national anthem. It is “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson, and it has replaced “The Star-Spangled Banner” at many black meetings with any pretense to nationalism. As the young pianist strikes the first note, over two hundred voices rise to carry the words out of the auditorium and into the seedy but hopeful ghetto of East Palo Alto. . . . The moment of catharsis over, Sister Armstrong now leads the assembly in repeating the Nairobi College Code: The Seven Principles of Blackness.33
The Seven Principles of Blackness they recited were what are more generally referred to now as the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa, the holiday founded in 1966 by a cultural nationalist, Maulana Karenga. While critics of the celebration of Kwanzaa have often derided it for being a contrived holiday—and a signal of the cultural deprivation or insecurity of African Americans, who according to detractors confusedly mimic West African harvest celebrations while using East African language, alongside “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—a counterinterpretation rapidly emerges. Like the pageants of the early twentieth century, the Nairobi College program was a blend of past and present, a collage of identity that spoke to the political moment and buoyed the commitment of those who would wage it.
Coombs concluded his essay with a moving reflection on Nairobi:
As the week ended I thought that the Nairobi experiment was really a naked call to ferret out the seeds of black pride that lie dormant in an abused people. And it is this call, really, that gives these students their bearing and their confidence in themselves. They come, after all, from ghettoes in which black men give up early, but it is their current realization that black life in this country is truly triumph over tragedy that pushes them, now, to give substance to that triumph. It is no wonder, then, that in the college catalogue a pantheon of black heroes are quoted. Patrice Lumumba: “A man without nationalist tendencies is a man without a soul.” Marcus Garvey: “Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for . . . I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in American and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.”34
Like Nairobi Day School, Nairobi College merged traditional forms of celebration found in black southern institutions with the radicalism of black politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Martha Biondi writes, “Nairobi adopted rituals that celebrated both African and African American culture and history. School holidays included Nigerian Independence Day on October 1, the founding of the Black Panther Party on October 17, Rosa Parks’ resistance to segregation on December 1, Ghanaian Independence on March 6, and Malcolm X’s birthday on May 19. Of course, Kwanzaa was celebrated from December 25 to January 1.”35
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was not merely a song of black affirmation in the age of black power, it was also a song of black protest. The protest politics ranged from the revolutionary socialism of the Black Panther Party to a new stage of arguments for inclusion, ones that did not romanticize integration yet demanded seats in predominantly white colleges and high schools. This inclusion was not the same as the inclusion sought by SCLC- or NAACP-style protest. It was an inclusion which insisted that black nationalist politics, aesthetics, and boldness had to be part of black people’s sitting at the proverbial table. In colleges and universities it was part of calls for black studies in the curricula and black dorms on campus. It emerged in some unlikely areas as well. When the National Convention of Black Lay Catholics met in Philadelphia in 1970, it passed a resolution insisting that the American Catholic Church respond to the needs of black Catholic parishes and seek and support vocations among black congregants. Black Catholics delivered this resolution to the apostolic delegate of the United States by motorcade and, once arrived at his residence at Catholic University in D.C., they burst into an impromptu singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
In Newark two years later, black students in public high schools walked out of classes and demanded an increase in the number of black teachers and black history courses. They also demanded the right to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” each day (a practice that was adopted and continued for many years in some Newark schools). Black youth in Newark were the descendants of migrants and for the most part hadn’t had the institutional experiences black children from the South had. Many also didn’t have Newark artist Baraka’s immediate connection to a southern past. Now they were demanding part of what their parents had left behind to come along with them in integrated spaces.
Similar confrontations arose in Richmond, Virginia, specifically around the anthem. Black composer Hale Smith was enlisted to respond. He recalled that “at the time there was trouble going on between white and black students . . . that had started when some black students had walked out rather than sing ‘Dixie.’” The next day white students walked out when the teacher, in compensation, wanted the students to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ The discord was spreading all through the state at that time.”
Smith responded by putting together an orchestral arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. “The audience [at concerts where the orchestra performed it] was very much mixed,” he observed, “and this particular anthem closed the program. It begins with a big orchestral introduction which leads into an orchestral treatment of the first part of the song. Therefore, the recognition of the piece was somewhat gradual. However, as soon as the audience caught on to what was going on they stood up . . . then the chorus started, unaccompanied. By the time they got to the second verse, everybody would be singing. . . . The sound was coming from the stage and from the audience. It ends big.”36
Smith’s arrangement would become one of the most popular of the end of the twentieth century, particularly for commemorative events celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Another classic arrangement that came out of the early 1970s was that of Roland Carter, whose arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is also often used today, particularly when it is sung collectively at ceremonial events. Carter’s arrangement has made it easier for untrained audiences to sing by bringing the piece down to a lower register.
Other musicians reinterpreted or simply reengaged the song in light of the spirit of the black power movement. Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers played “Lift Every Voice” at shows throughout the 1970s. Bobby Watson describes the sensibility of these performances:
When I was in the Jazz Messengers, Art had us play “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—the Black National Anthem—at the opening of every show. That was his musical statement. He didn’t go to the mic and talk about why he was doing this song; he just did it. He never made any speeches, but we all knew why. He was very political, and there was always an undercurrent of social awareness and black pride in the music. Art also demanded respect by the way he had us dress in the band. We wore overalls, and it was because as black men, off-stage, you could not just walk around free and get any respect dressing that way. But Art would not allow perceptions to dictate anything. He was saying, “You’re going to respect me for who I am, because I’m great at what I do.”37
The Roy Haynes Hip Ensemble also played “Lift Every Voice,” but they placed it at the end of their shows. Haynes describes one powerful performance on the anniversary of the composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn’s death:
When I had the group Roy Haynes Hip Ensemble, which was started in the late ‘60s, we were once playing at the Jazz Vespers at St. Peters, and it was during the period when I had George Adams and Hannibal Peterson in the front line. We used to close with the “Negro National Anthem” as [“Lift Every Voice and Sing”] was called back in the early days; Lift every voice and sing, ‘til earth and heaven ring. . . . and I would come out of this drum solo and go into that. . . . Dr. Logan, who was my doctor for a while, was Duke Ellington’s doctor, and they had just gone to the Hudson River to throw flo
wers in the water because [Strayhorn] was cremated; he was one of the first Blacks I know to say, “throw my ashes in the river,” and it was the Hudson. They came by the church afterwards and the church was packed. I went into this drum solo, then “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and [Logan and Ellington] stood up and the whole congregation stood up, and that was one of the most exciting things of my career—to have Duke Ellington in the audience, standing!38
There were distinct emphases in the various interpretations. Some musicians used the anthem primarily as a springboard for imagining the new terrain upon which black life would or should be built. For example, in 1969 pianist Andrew Hill released an album titled Lift Every Voice, and in 1971 bandleader and drummer Max Roach titled an album Lift Every Voice and Sing. Each blends an instrumental ensemble with a choir. But neither album actually has “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on it. Hill’s work is more abstract. The title track, “Lift Every Voice,” is filled with word repetition: free free free, song song song, we will not go back, move on to the stars . . . ascension—voice and sing—sun will shine. . . . Sometimes the vocalizations of the choir are chants, other times they holler. But the singers remain largely in the background, while the band is primary. The album is intertextual if not citational. He draws out elements from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” makes them unfamiliar, and reconsiders them in mantra-like form. The entire album has a searching quality to it, appropriate for the late freedom movement.
Max Roach’s album is the better known of the two. It is a reintegration of forms (gospel, blues, jazz, and spirituals) and coalesces as a journey through the emotional and creative spectrum of black music. By then, Roach had been making political music for over ten years. In 1960 he recorded We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. The record was originally intended to celebrate the 1963 centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. But Roach found his inspiration in black student activists instead. The lunch counter sit-ins were the impetus for his earlier release of the album. The sleeve notes to We Insist! begin, “A revolution is unfurling—America’s unfinished revolution. It is unfurling in lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools.” Roach played on the album with jazz greats Coleman Hawkins, Babatunde Olatunji, and the singer (and Roach’s future wife) Abbey Lincoln. After the release of We Insist! Roach declared, “I will never again play anything that does not have social significance.” He then went on to produce a series of powerful albums dedicated to the struggle for black emancipation—Members Don’t Get Weary, It’s Time, Speak Brother Speak, and finally Lift Every Voice and Sing. Over these years he performed benefit concerts for Malcolm X, the NAACP, and Martin Luther King’s SCLC. Clearly when he called his album Lift Every Voice and Sing, Roach was signaling his allegiance to something greater than himself. It was a commitment to blackness. On the album, Roach painted a sonic portrait of black cultural and spiritual life that echoed DuBois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk and yet was thoroughly modern.
Likewise, Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Aretha both reached back and moved forward. She recorded it over two days at the New Temple Baptist Missionary Church in Los Angeles, backed by the Southern California community choir directed by gospel great James Cleveland. It was a traditional gospel sound, coming from a great migration community. On the album cover, she attired herself in a traditional West African gown and head wrap. The cutting edge of black music reached back and way back with a new boldness. The same year, Aretha Franklin sang the anthem at the first Whitney Young Classic football game. The Classic was established in 1971 after Young, executive director of the Urban League, died unexpectedly while in Nigeria. It became an annual football game between two Louisiana HBCUs, Southern University and Grambling, but it was held in New York at Yankee Stadium and televised. Post-desegregation, historically black colleges and universities were the one type of educational institution where one could be assured that ritual singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” remained. At HBCUs, it was part of weekly chapel services, graduations, and programs when honored guests visited campus. Black Greek letter fraternity and sorority members were expected to learn all three verses. The Whitney Young Classic brought the culture of HBCUs into the public arena. And with that, along with a series of other key events, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was heard in the American mass-culture mainstream.
Ray Charles’s 1972 album Message from the People opened with “Lift Every Voice.” Although Charles was a music icon, this was a period of decline for him. In the 1950s and 1960s he had been one of the most popular artists in the nation. But by the early 1970s his fame was eclipsed by fresh styles and younger performers. He tried something new with this album, more in line with the energy of the newer artists. Message from the People would be Charles’s first and only explicitly political album. This turn was in part a reflection of how the social climate politicized artists, and also a sign of the demands audiences made upon artists of that era to produce politically relevant work.
Doing publicity for the album, Ray Charles performed his rendition of the anthem on the Dick Cavett Show. This performance, like his recorded version, was buoyant, even joyful. As Charles rocked and played, standing behind him were four soulful background singers in pastel-colored evening gowns. Two had afros and two wore straight bouffant wigs, as though they were spanning the styles of two decades at once. They swayed with spirit, in harmony with Charles’s lead voice. In the interview following the song, Cavett, known as the thinking man’s interviewer, was somewhat uncomfortably fixated on Charles’s blindness and seemed to deliberately avoid the obvious politics of his performance. But they were readily apparent. Charles was celebrating blackness.
“Lift Every Voice” appeared on various other television shows. In 1969 Bill Cosby sang it with the Art Reynolds Singers for the finale of his eponymous show. A week later, in a letter to the editor of the Amsterdam News, Vivian Williams responded to the finale: “At the End of Bill Cosby’s show last week I was caught speechless. I have two teenage sons, 17 and 18 years of age, and they were watching the show with 8 of their friends, girls and boys, all teenagers. At the end of the show the Negro National Anthem was sung but not one of the teenagers knew what it was. Three said they had heard of it. One boy said it should be printed and put around so we can hear it more. Dear God what is happening and what is going to happen to our Black children?”39 Her anxiety was symptomatic of both the losses wrought by desegregation and the demands for a renewed black public sphere. The performance itself was a sign that black people were taking up more space in the mainstream public sphere.
Black people, particularly activists and educators, pursued institution-building along with black consciousness. This was an internal job but one that was also publicly visible. Black faces moved into mainstream public life at an unprecedented rate in the early 1970s. For the first time, largely in response to the urban rebellions of the late 1960s, there was local black television programming in various cities in the early 1970s. Several of these shows were named Lift Every Voice, and they covered black arts, history, and contemporary social and political issues.
The spillover of black consciousness and black power politics into the public sphere ignited the imagination of nonblack artists as well. For example, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was part of the soundtrack to director Robert Altman’s 1970 film Brewster McCloud, which can be described as a mix of apocalyptic fantasy and existential crisis. It tells the story of a young white man living in a fallout shelter in the Houston astrodome. Brewster tries to build a pair of wings that will allow him to fly away from everything, a goal he ultimately fails in achieving. In the midst of the film a black band is playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” poorly. The conductor stops them and fusses. They begin again and then ultimately overtake her direction and start playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” As with Baraka’s Home on the Range, the scene is thick with the tension of black people taking over or overtaking the scene. Soul singer Merry Clayton performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for the fil
m, and Roger Ebert’s review offered particular praise for Clayton’s rendition, which he said “makes you want to jump up and run around the theater.”40 The expansiveness of blackness spreading into the public sphere was a play upon the treatment of black people as a threat, dangerous and pestilential. It was a play on the fear that produced white flight to the suburbs. But the aesthetic beauty of these artists’ performances rendered blackness enchanting and compelling, rather than fearsome.
Even James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, spread “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In 1975, a white boxer named Chuck Wepner challenged Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight boxing title. Ali was guaranteed $1.5 million for the fight, and Wepner, a relative unknown, signed for $100,000. It was Wepner’s big break. He trained for eight weeks straight. The fight was held on March 24 at the Richfield Coliseum outside of Cleveland. Before the fight began, James Brown was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He began accordingly. But then when he got to the phrase “the land of the free . . . ,” his voice lingered and slowed down. He repeated, “Free. Free. We wanna be free.” The crowd screamed its approval. Then he changed the melody and sped up, singing the first line, “Lift Every Voice and Sing, till earth and heaven ring,” and finished up “and the home of the brave.” The moment crackled with the intensity of black insistence. It was classically 1970s. Ali won that fight, and Chuck Wepner became the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky.