by Imani Perry
While “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was compellingly revived by many artists in the 1970s, the most significant recording of it in this period was that of Kim Weston, a singer whose voice was described as “ranging from black chiffon to shimmering velvet.”41 In May 1970 Kim Weston, a Motown alum and Motor City native who would also record for Stax Records, was a guest on the Tonight Show. She sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which she had included on her 1968 album This Is America. The album also included a version of “The House I Live In,” the song Sonny Rollins had ended with a brief quote of “Lift Every Voice” in 1956. Weston’s archive and sensitivity to the politics in music was apparent.
After Weston’s performance, the guest host for the Tonight Show, Flip Wilson, a popular African American comedian, announced to the audience that Weston had just sung the Negro National Anthem. The audience laughed in response. Wilson, however, went on to say: “I’m very serious. This is the Negro National Anthem. The Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has requested that radio stations all over the nation play the anthem as we rededicate ourselves to nonviolence as advocated by the late Dr. Martin Luther King.”42
Wilson was making a clear reference to the urban uprisings, often referred to as “riots.” They were dramatic responses to dire economic conditions and political frustration and rage. To call upon “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a disciplining tool against riots was interesting, but also rather ineffectual. The formalism once attached to the song, the socialization into grace, discipline, “good home training,” and knowing how to “act right” was waning. Young activists in the early 1970s, across the lines of race and class, were rejecting such social conventions and demands for appropriateness, at least when it came to political protest. They were also experimenting with radically expressive self-identification and presentation. Even the way Weston sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” swinging and full-throated, was more defiant than decorous.
In August 1972, a concert was held in Los Angeles to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts rebellion. This concert had been held annually, but this year was different. Stax Records and Schlitz Brewing Company were cosponsoring the event and filming it for a documentary. This would become Wattstax, popularly considered to be black America’s response to Woodstock. The radical potential of the concert was immediately diminished by the sponsorship of a beer company, a sign of things to come.
In the 1960s, corporations began to recognize black buyers as a desirable and long neglected consumer base and began to court them. Black-owned advertising agencies were hired to create ads specifically for black publications like Ebony and Essence. Without the help of black agencies, things could go poorly. For example, in 1967, Maier Brewing in Los Angeles introduced the racially targeted Soul Stout Malt Liquor and Soul Mellow Yellow Beer. The release of these targeted “soul” beers was met with ire-filled NAACP-led protests, and Maier pulled the brands. Beer corporations would have to be a bit more subtle. Hence Wattstax.
At the beginning of the show, Jesse Jackson shouted out into the concert audience: “This is a new day. This is a wonderful day. It is a day of black awareness. It is a day of black people taking care of black people’s business. Today we are together . . . and together, we got power!” The concert footage is interspersed with narration from Richard Pryor, and shots of the decaying Watts streets. The first song that we hear is “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by Kim Weston. The camera pans a wholly uninterested crowd. Next, Jesse Jackson has the audience stand and raise their right fists in the black power sign. He leads them in a call and response of William Borders’s poem “I Am Somebody,” which Jackson would recite frequently throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Then, Jackson asks the crowd to stand for “OUR Black National Anthem.” Kim Weston returns to the stage to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The stands are now filled with erect and focused people. Their fists remain raised. It does not appear that most are singing, perhaps because the lyrics weren’t well known by young black people born and raised on the West Coast, but the crowd is nevertheless rapt and at attention. They are patriots to blackness.
Their refusal of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was symbolic of the era. Black people were tired of the broken promises of the American dream. Their feelings were appropriate. In Boston, the school busing crisis revealed that even the reputedly most liberal parts of the nation could be frighteningly hostile to black Americans. Black children who were sent to white schools were trapped on buses with white mobs surrounding them, throwing bottles and yelling slurs. Actress and activist Victoria Rowell recalls that in the midst of this violence “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was sung at organizing meetings: “I can remember sitting as a child . . . at an assembly for the desegregation of schools in Boston. Suddenly, everyone stood up and sang this glorious song. . . . I’d never heard it before. My mother told me it was the Black National Anthem. A chorus of beautiful black voices resonating throughout the hall. One had to believe that God heard them.”43 As with conflicts of the past, the busing crisis in Boston revealed that solidarity between black and white working-class people was often thwarted by antiblack racism, and not just in the South. Black nationalism could be both bulwark and affirmation in the face of that reckoning. A number of observers noted that the white South Boston and Charleston residents who believed they were protecting their kids from black encroachment, already sent their children to schools that were under-resourced just like those in predominantly black communities. Black students weren’t being bused to better schools, and the white protesters weren’t protecting anything of material value. Their reaction was simply racism. Rather than join black parents in demanding better from the Boston school department, they retaliated against black children. Similarly, black desegregation activists in Boston soon realized that busing would not be a path to either educational equality or integration.
By the late 1970s it was clear that the black nationalists, along with youthful revolutionaries of all races, antiwar activists, feminists, and communists, despite their passion and purpose, had been soundly defeated in their ambitions to radically transform the society. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s surveillance and counterintelligence program that targeted black nationalists, pushed the most radical branches of the black freedom movement into disarray. Beginning in the mid-1970s, federal courts were rolling back the legislative gains of the civil rights movement. The antiwar movement had gone from radically challenging the status quo to a general melancholy that settled across America as thousands of coffins holding the corpses of American teenagers returned from a war that most Americans believed was at least misguided and at worst completely unjust.
Concessions to activists were made, but they fell far short of revolution. Individual gains among people long excluded were apparent, championed, and even celebrated, at the same time as the bigger dreams of so many radicals were eroded. Women and people of color began to experience the benefits of affirmative action programs in employment and education. Gender and ethnic studies programs were available to those who had access to higher education. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in this context became a signifier or symbol of blackness, rather than a ritual. It marked identity rather than practice.
That is not to say it was meaningless. It became a part of a renewed interest in archiving black history, now often with the support of predominantly white universities and publishing companies. For instance, in the early 1970s publishers released several children’s book versions of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And since that time, there have consistently been illustrated children’s book versions of the song and many books in general either named “Lift Every Voice” or named after another phrase in the song, such as “Stony the road we trod” or “Let us march on ‘til victory is won.” The assertion of identity and the enshrining of the history of the anthem along with important figures in black history was significant. But this enshrinement coincided with the steady loss of rituals for many black Americans.
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nbsp; In 1976 the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, formerly the ASNLH, officially expanded Negro History Week to Black History Month, whose celebration has become a key part of how mainstream educational institutions acknowledge racial diversity and the heterogeneity of the United States. But even some fifty years later, it is the rare institution that has pursued fundamental transformation of curricula to make it deeply inclusive of African American and African history and culture. Truly racially integrated institutions are few and far between, and traditionally black institutions that have maintained a deep commitment to the study of African American history and culture as well as black formalism are just as rare.
Some black thinkers grew skeptical of Black History Month soon after its institutionalization. They worried about how it quickly became a means for selling consumer goods, and how superficially it was celebrated. In 1997, a group of scholars published essays in an issue of the Journal of Negro History about the danger that Black History Month in the post–freedom movement era had become merely an empty reason to buy and sell black ephemera rather than the pedagogically and politically meaningful ritual of teaching black history that once existed in black schools. The steady erosion of black associational life had hastened this decline. In his contribution to the issue, Allen B. Ballard wrote nostalgically about the past:
Black history month will always be associated in my mind with Miss Nelly Bright, principal of the Joseph E. Hill School, the segregated elementary school in Philadelphia that I attended as a child in the 1930s. Throughout the year, the halls and classrooms of that school were decorated with pictures of such notables as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Alexander Dumas, and each of our weekly school assemblies began with the singing of the Negro National Anthem. But to Nelly Bright, Negro History Week, its name then, was something special. It was a time for skits about the Underground Railroad, poetry readings of the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, art contests for the best Negro history poster and a special chorus to sing such spirituals as “Walk Together Children” or “Steal Away.” The week was always climaxed by the appearance of a famous local black person—I remember so well the time that Marian Anderson came and sang and then bent down to sweep a bunch of us little children into her arms. When Nelly Bright finished with her kind of celebration we knew that we were important people, that great things were expected of us, and that we had a tradition of honor, excellence and perseverance to uphold. That meant a lot to us as we daily walked by the spanking brand-new white school with its high wire fences on our way to the Hill School three blacks past it. The purpose of Negro History Week was clear—to give us an intellectual and emotional anchor in the midst of overt racism, legal segregation and the attendant myths of white superiority.44
When Ballard wrote his essay, the most overt forms of racism were in decline, legally enforced segregation was no more, and institutional racism was harder to apprehend and ward oneself against. Might those rituals he missed be passé in light of that shift? Could they be replicated in institutions that weren’t black-controlled and ensconced in black communities? It was hard to say. These scholars were undoubtedly right, however, to be concerned with the commodification of black cultural practices. Increases in disposable income and leisure time that went along with a growing black middle class and black peoples’ entry into new labor markets and higher education in unprecedented numbers meant that black people didn’t just participate in the culture of black power and black consciousness, they bought it with identity artifacts: Afro-sheen hair spray, picks with fists at the end, and mass produced dashikis. These were commodities. Kwanzaa, a holiday that began as an anticonsumerist project, fell prey to commodification, too. The holiday was intended as a ritual that would reconnect and reaffirm African American culture with continental African culture by means of seven principles for living. In the beginning Kwanzaa was also intended as an alternative to Christmas, a holiday overwhelmed by commercialism.
From the outset, Kwanzaa ceremonies often included a singing of “Lift Every Voice,” which was a nod to black history in the United States, but most of it was more akin to a pageant or pantomime of West African harvest holidays. As I have noted, this structure is, in its own way, a continuation of the pageant traditions of the early twentieth century. Soon, however, Kwanzaa cards, Kwanzaa clothes, and Kwanzaa artifacts threatened to turn it into the very commercialism against which it was meant to serve as an antidote, and to distance it from the community-building pageant tradition from whence it grew. That’s not surprising. A new economic philosophy emerged in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism is a riskier form of capitalism. As it descended upon the U.S. economy, it encouraged everyone to become an entrepreneur and allowed money to move even more easily across borders. Exploited laborers in former colonies increasingly produced goods to serve the consumer desires of people in the West, while the poor in Western nations found work disappearing. The entrepreneurial impulse that defined this economic turn coincided neatly with the ideal of ownership that had long been embraced in black communities as people sought some degree of autonomy from white bosses. The self-creation aspect of this new economic philosophy was readily embraced by many in the black community who believed in the gospel of black entrepreneurship as they thought ruefully back to the independent economic spheres of black towns and some black commercial districts of an earlier era. The other side of neoliberalism, however, was that alongside this advocacy of autonomy came the marketization of everything, as well as a sink-or-swim philosophy that would devastate the poorest people in this country.
Yet optimism ran high in many sectors of the black community during the 1970s, before all this became apparent. Black radio ownership expanded rapidly. The number of black-owned stations grew from sixteen to eighty-eight in the 1970s. Two black-owned and operated radio networks were established in the 1970s as well: Mutual Black Network and the National Black Network. The trend in radio during this period was to deemphasize news and public affairs programming and focus on standardized formats with a lot of music. This threatened the rich tradition of political commentary on black radio when it was smaller or more local. Fortunately, however, this change didn’t fully depoliticize black radio, because popular black music was frequently overtly political in the first half of the 1970s. So much so that a series of songs emerged to claim the status of new anthems of black America: Parliament Funkadelic’s “One Nation under a Groove,” McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” and many other generational odes. Nina Simone even said she hoped that her “(To Be) Young, Gifted and Black,” inspired by her late friend Lorraine Hansberry, would displace “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as black America’s anthem. And it was the closest in succeeding. “Young Gifted and Black” was declared the new Black National Anthem by CORE in 1971.45 Originally recorded and released by Simone in 1969, it was featured on her 1970 album Black Gold and rose to number eight on the R&B chart. Subsequently a number of other artists covered it, including Donny Hathaway, the Heptones, and Aretha Franklin, who also named one of her albums after it, Young, Gifted and Black.
The passionate embrace of blackness was in some sense an attempt to recover feelings that couldn’t be recovered, and to hold on to hopes that proved to be fragile. The society had not become equal, but it had become more accessible. Black life was more diffuse. There was increased opportunity, though never nearly enough. People strayed from the tight-knit communities and the networked organizations. The black institutions that remained still held on to the anthem, but there were fewer of them. Black newspapers began to disappear, unsustainable because they drew inadequate advertising funds and mainstream newspapers covered some of the news pertaining to black people.
Among the most resilient institutions when it came to black formalist practice, however, were black colleges and universities, which continued to educate the majority of the black professional classes and embraced tradition even when other colleges we
re become assiduously casual places. Students at HBCUs still had to dress for chapel, observe parietals, and sing the anthem ritually when they weren’t talking about revolution or taking over campus buildings like their counterparts at predominantly white institutions. In a 1975 letter to high formalist fellow poet Robert Hayden, Michael Harper described a visit to Southern and Jackson State Universities:
Just returned from New Orleans, Baton Rouge (Southern U), and Jackson State, where I saw Margaret Walker. The trip, on the whole, was very good, but some mindless performances by our people, the students who don’t read or think, but “politic”—questions from the gallery about how poems relate to the people, and faculty catering to this nonsense, an attack on May Miller (Kelly’s daughter), and Mari Evans saying she could only write the political poem—consciousness is political! At the same time Mari admires your work enormously, told me about a story when you two met at the bus station in Chicago, and her continued joy at your poems. Margaret’s been ill, had a no. of operations, bad kidneys and other ailments, and slow of energy. She was gracious, and just as worried as ever, about her writing, her inability to concentrate, finish her autobiography, and other projects she’s had stored up for weeks on end. The students were mostly demoralized, and into student elections—in fact, I fear that we’ve lost the major battle re schools and education, raising class upon class of illiterates, who have no appreciation of the struggles we waged. I was still inspired by the nat’l anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was the opening of the convocation at Jackson State. Then the southern lunch, with the president, scheduled, but absent. I did meet him in the 9 story building on the 9th floor. I like your comments about the Dunbar poem—you know that the “double-conscious brother in the veil” recalls not so much DuBois, as the tradition, the fusing of Dunbar’s sensibility, and promise, his hopes to draft poems that would speak to both traditions, Afro-American and American, and his failure to do such as he bantered for an audience, for a market.46