by Imani Perry
The generational gap between Harper and the students is palpable in the letter. He dismisses their explicitly nationalistic politics and their boldness. He holds fast to “the tradition,” that striving black formalist pursuit of excellence. Years later, the friend to whom he wrote, Robert Hayden, would write an epic poem answering Stephen Vincent Benét’s call for a black-skinned epic response to his 1928 book-length poem John Brown’s Body. Hayden’s endeavor, in relation to Benét’s poem, was akin to the relationship between “Lift Every Voice” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Hayden, like the Johnson brothers, depicted black life in epic terms. His work stood in contrast and complement to a white-authored vision of the struggle for democracy.
Tellingly, then, in 1975, a moment Harper describes as one of generational conflict, the only point of connection that the curmudgeonly Harper felt with this new black generation and the brash form of their struggles with white supremacy, the only tie binding these rakish young people with their elders, was through the anthem. He assumed that the similarly formalist poet Hayden would understand. Harper was “still inspired” by “it,” that “it” being not just the song but the collective voice with which the anthem was sung. It was alive, even as formalism was gasping.
By then, however, the “we” to whom the song referred wasn’t secure. The idea, though sometimes fantastical, of belonging to a black world had been sustained for most of the twentieth century. But after independence was gained by many black nations (and neocolonialism settled in), and black nationalist movements within Western powers were either crushed or incorporated into the status quo, the common thread that stretched across the black world seemed to have been lost or at least worn so fine as to be nearly invisible. Some individuals maintained the connections. Carmichael, along with some other former members of SNCC and the black power movements, migrated abroad. They went to Tanzania, Ghana, and Guinea, or joined efforts to build a revolutionary black nation in Grenada, while others went to graduate school to build lives as university professors, and others still were locked behind bars as political prisoners. Many of them labored to sustain the tradition of transnational black political communities. But these were for the most part individual bonds, or tiny networks, not movements.
Within those fine threads of black internationalism, however, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” often reappeared, quieter and yet still, for some, a signifier of black identity that transcended the nation-state. In 1976, the military president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, called for a National Arts Theatre to be built in Lagos. Nigeria had oil, and therefore wealth. At the National Arts Theatre, Nigeria hosted the Second World Festival of Black Art, from January 15 to February 12, 1977. Attended by more than 17,000 participants from over fifty countries, it was the largest cultural event ever held on the African continent. Such festivals were planned as Pan-African celebrations and ranged in content from performance—particularly dance and theater—to debate. Paule Marshall, the Barbadian American novelist and short story writer, described attending this festival, called FESTAC 77, in her memoir Triangular Road. Marshall traveled to Nigeria to come to terms with her “tripartite self”: American, Barbadian, and African. There she was at once inspired to connect with her Africanness, and yet dismayed at what her presence and that of other American black people who had come to Nigeria for FESTAC revealed about their struggle. She described them as “Unprepared. Unrehearsed. Improvised. Disorganized.” In one scene, the group she has traveled with marches aimlessly through Lagos, some singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” others singing “Amen.”47 The confusion she depicts is vaguely reminiscent of the divergent energies of the March Against Fear, and the crisis after King’s death. What it portended this time was not a shift in the movement but rather its dissipation.
Chapter Seven. A Piece of the Rock
Post–Civil Rights Losses, Gains, and Remnants
There’s a lot of chocolate cities, around
We’ve got Newark, we’ve got Gary
Somebody told me we got L.A.
And we’re working on Atlanta
But you’re the capital, cc
Gainin’ on ya!
Get down
Gainin’ on ya!
Movin’ in and on ya
Gainin’ on ya!
Can’t you feel my breath, heh
Gainin’ on ya!
All up around your neck, heh
—Parliament, “Chocolate City”
One of the more tangible outcomes of the late 1960s freedom movement was the rise of black leadership in electoral politics. Carl Stokes became the mayor of Cleveland in 1967, the same year Richard Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary, Indiana. Between 1967 and 1995, approximately 400 black mayors were elected in American cities, a remarkable transformation in local leadership that began just over a decade after Jim Crow had been declared unconstitutional. Hatcher hosted the National Black Political Convention in 1972. In attendance were activists, nationalists, revolutionaries, and politicians from across the political spectrum. The convention was declared an all-black space, with no white speakers and no white reporters. The NAACP and the Urban League chose not to attend because of this racial exclusivity, although there were many political moderates in attendance alongside radicals. The convention’s cochairs were Hatcher, U.S. Representative Charles Diggs of Michigan, and Newark’s Imamu Amiri Baraka, who was at that time the program chairman for the Congress of African People. Forty-two states were represented. Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Roy Innis (CORE), Haki Madhubuti, and Nixon aide Robert Brown were all present.
The convention’s theme was “Unity without Uniformity.” One attendee recalled, “Of course, not everyone was there. Not every group was represented at high levels. For example, although members of the NAACP participated, I don’t recall representation by anyone in a senior leadership position of that organization. Nevertheless, the Convention was a hopeful sign. I was there and found the proceedings extremely moving. The dialogue was heated at times, uplifting at others. When the audience rose to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ with fists raised in the air (yes, even Coretta had her fist raised and I have the photo to prove it!), it was amazing.”1 They’d come together bringing along a history of political and ideological differences, and yet by singing the Black National Anthem with fists raised, they celebrated the militant energy of the historical period as they sought to answer the question King had posed some years prior: “Where do we go from here?”
Discussions held over three days focused primarily on whether it was better for black people to achieve within existing power structures or create new ones altogether, ones built specifically for and by black people. Eight thousand people, 3,000 of them delegates, grappled with this question together. They talked about eliminating capital punishment, nationalizing health care, and community control of schools, among other timely issues. Although many attendees would complain that the gathering was disorganized and overwhelmingly male, it was a collective confrontation with the fork in the road.
The call for black political power was met, even in the heart of Dixie. In 1973 Atlanta’s Maynard Jackson was elected the first black mayor of a large southern city. The successful mayoral campaigns of black politicians were widely understood as part of the black freedom struggle. That doesn’t mean that political unity was commonplace among these representatives. Ambitions differed, as did personalities, ideologies, and circumstances. But the campaigns of this new pool of black politicians were generally facilitated by the white flight to the suburbs that followed desegregation and ramped up in the aftermath of urban uprisings. And the black political class was larger and more powerful than it had ever been before.
Stella White’s memory of the first Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) dinner in 1971 marked it as an unquestionable extension of the movement. She described how “nails of four fingers dug deeply into the palm of my hand as a surge of emotion was held aloft in that right hand. Closing words of the Negro National Anthem cresce
ndoed to a close—3,000 voices, as one filled with hope. No longer is the anthem sung in a slow tempo, cadence is faster, more lively, a new dignity punctuating its rhythm.”2 Each year the dinner maintained a commitment to racial identity and yet also became fancier. In 1974, with a theme “A Tribute to Strong Black Women,” Aretha Franklin performed for guests. In 1975 the annual CBC dinner featured the Newark Boys Choir singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the black Republican Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke presenting the awards. Tickets by then were $100 each and the popular R&B group the O’Jays provided entertainment. Guests of honor included the widows of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. It was a lavish event. Speakers preached the gospel of self-reliance and encouraged guests to fundraise for the CBC in their home communities. Pageantry and pomp in the black political class was taking on new forms, more exclusive and at a greater remove from their constituents.
But black communities continued to be deeply invested in black politics. And over the 1970s the ceremonial singing of “Lift Every Voice” became a symbol of chocolate cities with black power brokers and elected officials. The anthem was played at the inaugurations of Maynard Jackson in Atlanta and Harold Washington in Chicago. At Washington’s ceremony “he straightened his shoulders, upwardly tilted his chin, positioned his arm for the arm of his fiancée and walked the ceremonial 300-foot stretch to become inaugurated as the forty-second mayor of the city of Chicago.”3 Cardinal Joseph Bernardin offered the invocation. Gwendolyn Brooks read her poem, “Chicago: The I Will City,” and writer Studs Terkel spoke. The Chicago Children’s Choir led everyone in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and “Jesus Cristo, Hombre y Dios.” Brooks’s poem echoed the themes of the anthem, but placed them in the soul of the city rather than black people generally, saying, “Now the way of the I will city is on this wise: ripe roused ready: richly rambunctious, implausible: sudden, or saddle-steady. In the jamboree jounce and jumble of our Season of Senselessness the I Will City is ready to rise. Toward robust radiance. Valid! Away from hunger, anger, and from dread. Toward health and difficult splendor. Toward immense creative indignation and defense. Toward, verily, the level land beneath the solid tread.”
Harold Washington was a beloved mayor, and during his first term, on February 4, 1986, the Bulls game against the Detroit Pistons was dedicated to Black History Month and began with not the conventional “Star-Spangled Banner” but “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” performed by the Wendell Phillips High School A Cappella Choir.4 Chicago, with its long history of ghettoizing and marginalizing much of its substantial black population, was symbolically in a new era. But it was also one in which appeals to racial equality were made by companies as marketing devices. David Rosengard, the vice president of marketing and broadcasting for the Bulls organization, stated in explanation, “The Chicago Bulls are proud to acknowledge black history month.”5 This was a savvy move in a city that was half black, with an organized black political class. Margaret Burroughs, founder of Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History, said in response, “I think it is very important that the song expresses past struggles of our people and our hopes and determination to attain a better future is exposed. . . . I hope it will be sung up tempo as a fighting song and not a funeral dirge.”6 Certainly, under the leadership of Harold Washington, the political spirit of black Chicago was on an ascent even as the economic conditions of black people across the nation declined.
U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan of Texas also used the song as a symbol of black aspiration and attainment. Elected to Congress in 1972 and 1974, Jordan made a widely viewed and highly regarded speech before the House Judiciary Committee in support of Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Two years later, she became the first African American woman to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Five years later Jordan retired from public life. In the first year of her retirement she was invited to record a version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Jordan narrated the song accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London as part of an album titled Symphonic Spirituals, which also included the Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and the Negro-spiritual-turned-freedom song “This Little Light of Mine.” Jordan’s improvisations on “Lift Every Voice” made the song explicitly Christian, but she also brought to mind the Augusta Savage sculpture in her riffs “Praise him with the Harp, praise him with stringed instruments.”
A time of praise turned soon into a time filled with lament. Black mayors and politicians of the 1970s and 1980s came to power having to confront the issues of communities that had suffered from generations of neglect. In many cities the hopes held by mayors and their constituents were simply unrealizable. Unemployment, urban decay, and deindustrialization, combined with a diminished tax base, were challenges enough, but soon the country would swing dramatically to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan, making their work even more difficult.
In 1979, Sam Attlesley, a black politician from Dallas, described black voters as “an army without a general,” saying, “I am not convinced we have reached the point where we can sing Lift Every Voice as doxology rather than an exhortation for continuing action.”7 Furthermore, the mainstream of the country was no longer with black people’s struggles (if it ever was). The tide had turned, and the exhortation might just fall on deaf ears.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor and former California governor, soundly defeated the incumbent president, peanut farmer and former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Reagan swooped in promising further deregulation of businesses and the diminishment of civil rights in favor of “states’ rights.” He began his presidential campaign with a “states’ rights” speech delivered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the site where civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney had been murdered, sending a not-too-subtle message of hostility toward the civil rights movement and its gains.
A report on the 1980 Urban League Convention captured the sentiment of black political organizations in the midst of the rise of Reagan: “The perception of a national stampede to the right, severe recessionary damage in black neighborhoods, the end of a 12 year respite from major urban riots and the recent shooting of Urban League President Vernon E. Jordan were cited by many delegates as the reason for one of the league’s most joyless conventions in a long time.”8 Jordan, who had survived a sniper attack in Fort Wayne, Indiana, made a surprise appearance during the convention. He was wheeled to his hospital auditorium and “received a two-minute standing ovation as he rose from the wheelchair and firmly strode across the stage to the podium. He began by reciting a stanza of the Negro anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ and offering a short prayer.”9 Raised in Atlanta, where he sang the song at Emancipation Day programs and played it in his high school marching band, Jordan was strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. He was wise to be worried about the impact of Reagan.
Jordan had frequently been criticized by black leftists for his connection to the Carter administration. For example, William Sales wrote of him, “To place the stamp of validity upon this testimonial to the ‘American Dream’ Jordan rhetorically wraps himself in the red white and blue, calls upon God and country while singing the last stanza and chorus of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle.’ . . . This emerging black bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie is beginning to see that it will have to play out its role within the confines of the status quo.” Sales went on to comment on Jordan’s willingness to criticize rioters but not exploitative gas companies and big banks. However, with Reagan’s election, both black party-line Democrats and far leftists were out of favor and out of luck.
In 1980 black political leaders gathered yet again, this time in Richmond. They wanted to shape a black agenda for the decade. Again the gathering, sponsored by the Urban League and the Congressional Black Caucus, brought together a cross-section of black leadership, including Richard Hatcher, Cardiss Col
lins, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Ron Dellums, Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Height, Dick Gregory, Joseph Lowery, William Gray, and Mickey Leland. There were also lawyers, doctors, business people, and academics from across the country. They held a slew of workshops and drafted a series of white papers. The representatives from the business sector dedicated themselves to gathering resources in order to widely distribute information about the agenda that the group had agreed upon. A primary focus of the gathering was closing the employment and income gaps between black and white Americans. Delegates also believed a national voter registration drive would facilitate a steady increase in the number of black elected officials, and they dedicated themselves to that pursuit as well. Further, they advocated a boycott of South Africa, an end to police brutality against black people in the United States, and an increase in aid to Caribbean and African nations. For black youth, they planned to form a national youth coalition that would support young people in educational and employment goals, and prevent drug abuse and violence in the black community.