by Imani Perry
Hip-hop uttered its farewell to the Black National Anthem. Once upon a time, this was a song around which black immigrants and migrants articulated shared identity and forged it, too. Once it was a part of a ritualistic sphere of black life. But that sphere ceased to exist for many young black people when legal desegregation and middle-class mobility took hold. For someone like Wyclef Jean, who had emigrated from Haiti to New York in the late 1970s, it is easy to imagine that the song would have no particular significance at all. But it is worthwhile to contemplate why he treated it as something to rework, and not simply to leave behind. This new fabric of “Lift Every Voice” was tattered and much, much smaller but never completely forgotten.
In 1988, the U.S. Postal Service issued a twenty-two-cent James Weldon Johnson stamp as part of its Black Heritage series. Underneath an image of his face are the words and notation of the first line of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” along with the designation “Black Heritage USA.” It was a symbolic achievement, but merely that: symbol. Likewise, when Stevie Wonder snuck it into his “Star-Spangled Banner” performance at the 2005 NBA All-Star game, it was sweet but not particularly moving, and certainly little more than a blip in comparison to his substantial corpus of works devoted to profound depictions and expressions of black life and consciousness.
The culture wars raged through the late 1980s and 1990s. Affirmative action was diminished and in some places disappeared. So did many black spaces—dorms, cultural centers, programs—that had been hard earned on college campuses in the 1970s. Black unemployment remained chronic, black imprisonment skyrocketed, and transiency as a result of eviction and gentrification weakened community ties in many cities. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was still sung here and there, mostly as part of Black History Month programs or at black college graduations, but not nearly as frequently.
Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. Clinton was referred to as “the First Black President” by Toni Morrison, in a manner that was at once tongue in cheek but also a commentary upon the right wing’s use of tropes usually applied to black people to attack Bill Clinton. But no matter how much sneering there was at his poor background, his single mother, and his drug-addicted brother, Clinton, like all U.S. presidents, was ultimately implicated in a system that sustained racial inequality. While his affinity for and appeal to black people was widely noticed, his welfare reform legislation both deepened poverty in black communities and created more precarious conditions for people living in cities who had relied on public assistance when employment had disappeared. Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—that is, his version of “law and order”—was the largest crime bill in U.S. history and led to dramatic increases in incarceration, even as crime rates were steadily decreasing. These policies further damaged black associational life by weakening social ties and stability. It is somewhat ironic, then, that Bill Clinton not only knows the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—all three verses. Vernon Jordan once recalled that Bill Clinton sent him a photograph of the two of them singing the song at a party on Martha’s Vineyard in 1993. The president inscribed the picture with the words “from the only white man in America who knows all the words.”12
When Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Congressional Medal of Freedom, Jessye Norman led the audience in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Tom Joyner remembered that “every living black dignitary was in the audience that great day and everyone stood and sang the first verse loudly and proudly. . . . As we got to the second verse, the singing got faint. Most of us left it up to Miss Norman, who had the words in front of her. The only person in the room who sang every word of every verse by heart was Bill Clinton. By the third verse he and Jessye Norman were doing a duet.”13 Clinton’s intimacy with rituals of black space, one that he was afforded by virtue of his many years in the South living with close ties to black communities, one that earned him a good deal of trust from black constituents, was increasingly unavailable to young black people who came of age during his presidency.
That said, in the 1990s, black organizations continued to try to revive and revitalize the political energies and social organization of the past. In 1995, the Million Man March on Washington was called for by the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Under the banner of the Nation, various civil rights organizations joined the march. Even though the national NAACP refused to participate due to a number of Farrakhan’s controversial statements regarding Jewish and white people, the Washington, D.C., branch was present. One controversy regarding the march was Farrakhan’s insistence that it be only for men. This seemed to some observers to be a sign that the marchers were advocating for black male patriarchy rather than black people’s freedom writ broadly. After the march a number of the attendees criticized Louis Farrakhan, whose very long concluding speech veered into a stream of consciousness about numerology and cosmology incomprehensible to the majority of the participants who were not members of the Nation of Islam. And there were conflicts over the size of the crowd. Conference organizers said 1 million people attended. The U.S. Park Service put the numbers at about 400,000. The Park Service was accused of racism and of making a deliberate effort to diminish the magnitude of the gathering. A back-and-forth debate was waged on television and in newspapers.
Over the course of the actual march day, many prominent speakers, including the national director of the march, Benjamin Chavis, spoke to the massive crowd. The speeches were lengthy and often meandering. There was very little music, although at one point an adoring crowd surrounded Isaac Hayes, who stood on top of his tour bus, arms outstretched, in an elaborate caftan reminiscent of his 1971 Black Moses album cover. The march preached self-help, a renewed commitment to the health of black communities, and dedication to shifting the negative public image of black men. But the follow-up strategy quickly lost momentum.
Two years later, black women held the Million Woman March in Philadelphia. This march was principally organized by grassroots activist Phile Chionesu. It was held on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia’s Center City. The Million Woman March focused on social, political, and economic development in black communities, as well as on nurturing a global sisterhood of black women. Marchers called for healing from conflict and enmity among black women, and the restoration of family and community bonds among black people. Approximately half a million people attended, and the women sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the end of the day. Notwithstanding the gravitas of the moment, it also did not translate into sustained political mobilization.
The Million Family March was smaller than the previous two marches and was called by the Nation of Islam like the first. The focus was again on personal improvement. The marchers were encouraged to eat healthfully and, reflecting the Nation’s social conservatism, were told to marry and stay married, and to maintain strong communities. They also raised money to pay off the mortgage for the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Organizers noted that the NCNW headquarters was the only black-owned building in the nation’s corridor of power. The group of thousands sat or stood on the lawn in front of the Capitol. Together, those who knew it sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Certainly these marches were significant. They showed a continued dedication by large numbers of people to the goal of thriving black communities. They subverted dominant images of black people as apathetic. However, these marches did not lead to social movement, or any systematic institution-building. Perhaps because of their large size, they also lacked the sophisticated analyses of domestic and foreign policy that characterized the Pan-African congresses and other national and international black meetings of earlier generations. The marches and meetings of earlier generations could do more with more sustainable agendas, in large part because they relied upon a thickly networked associational life. They didn’t need a single dramatic mobilization of thousands to reach thousands, because the networks could carry news and ideas to smaller gatheri
ngs with extended deliberations. But by the late 1990s, black associationalism was not simply largely absent but also unpracticed for black adults who had come of age after desegregation. They could go to a march, be moved, and then never think about it again. Easily.
Afterword
The end is bitter with only the slightest sweetness. After eight increasingly frustrating years of the second Bush presidency, marked by September 11 and the continuing toll of two long wars, candidate Barack Obama stood as a beacon of hope: hope for new beginnings, for the possibility of a changed course in our national political vision, and for a refuge from the painful politics of race. That hope was unrealistic, premature, and sophomoric at best.
One hint of how overinflated this hope was could be found in the furor around singer Rene Marie. In July 2008, she stood onstage in advance of the Denver State of the City address. Charged with singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she adhered to its melody but sang the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”1 This was less than a month before the Democratic National Convention would be held in Denver. The widespread quick and impassioned denouncement of Rene Marie by many public commentators included fears that her gesture threatened the candidacy of Barack Obama, who in a few short weeks would be named the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Marie’s singing smacked of black nationalism to many listeners, and more than that, disloyalty to the nation. Candidate Obama echoed the patriotic words of earlier critics: “If she was asked to sing the national anthem, she should have sung that. ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is a beautiful song, but we only have one national anthem.”
The idea that any explicit articulation of blackness, of black fidelity or black identity, would be understood as hostile to “America” and “Americana” would continue to dog and even hinder President Obama and further stymied the pursuit of racial justice and equality by black communities in general. Having a black president was supposed to be enough. And his election was overwhelming for Americans and especially black Americans. For some it seemed to be a sign that we had finally scaled our way to “the mountaintop” King had once prophesied. For many others it simply was an extraordinary event in this country, where the original sin of slavery still shapes so much of our lives. At his inauguration, held on a cold, wet Washington morning, hundreds of thousands thronged as breathless witnesses to history. After President Obama was sworn into office, Joseph Lowery, a veteran of the civil rights movement, offered the benediction, echoing Benjamin Mays in 1963.
Like Mays, he began with the final verse of “Lift Every Voice”: “God of our weary years, god of our silent tears . . .” But, unlike Mays, he continued. This was not a subtle gesture but a fully formed homage to the anthem:
. . . thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our god, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day.
We pay now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.
The moment was weighted with a particular history, a black history, and a particular message to black America. The third verse is the one that warns and prays. It reminds the people to stay the course toward freedom.
But what exactly was the course? Pundits speculated incessantly that Obama’s presidency promised to make us finally “postracial.” This postracial formulation seemed to many of us who write and think about race, and to the many more who experienced the daily impact of racial inequality, to reflect a desire to be rid of having to think about racism rather than an actual commitment to eradicating racism. Racial inequality was everywhere. And it deepened after the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, a crisis that was produced by a deregulated and racially discriminatory mortgage market. But there seemed to be very little political will among politicians of any rank to respond to the persistence of American racism.
Even as most black people, and many others as well, rejected the fiction that we were postracial, there was a more remote theory of race in the twenty-first century that advocated a more nuanced understanding of the moment in black life, and that was “postblackness.” Thelma Golden, the distinguished curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem used the phrase in the context of the 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum. It was an extraordinary show, and one of its installations so inspired me that I chose stills from it for the cover art for my first book, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Freestyle featured twenty-eight black artists, who were “postblack” in that they were not defined by a singular idea of blackness. They were individual artists with particular stories, and yet each was steeped in black cultural practices and traditions. These were the post–civil rights “children of hip-hop” looking for ways of describing themselves that resisted the traditional categories of race men and women, or conventional civil rights notions of uplift and dignity. These artists with varying experiences and influences were joined under the general category of blackness, yet they also had enough distinctiveness that they rejected the idea that they could easily be identified by a single tradition. Postblackness was porous, and at times amorphous.
Writers and visual artists who could be classified as part of postblackness have since played with the Black National Anthem. The protagonist in Paul Beatty’s satirical novel Slumberland is a black deejay in East Germany named Ferguson W. Sowell who goes by the appellation DJ Darky. Along with the conceit of having a phonographic memory, DJ Darky is obsessed with Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, a musician who disappeared into East Germany in the 1960s. In the novel Darky is gifted with an already-scored tape that is so stunning and transformative that he believes it must be the work of the Schwa. So he makes his way to Slumberland, a bar in Berlin where he determines it was recorded. In advance, DJ Darky has put together “the perfect beat,” which he hopes will be played over by the Schwa. Darky’s search for meaning and music, in the midst of the Cold War’s demise and the exportation of black popular culture across the globe, is rendered satirically and provocatively. When he finally encounters the Schwa, however, Darky’s race mettle is tested.
He was switching up the tempo. Seguing from a frenzied fortissimo to a languid legato by quoting from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro National anthem. It’s a beautiful yet trepidatious song, and especially so in his hands. Musical mason that he was, the Schwa erected a series of African American landmarks upon the foundation I had laid down. . . . Despite the tune’s genius, in my mental landscape where blackness is passé quoting the Negro National anthem was a blatant violation of the zoning laws. By constructing a new black Berlin wall in both my head and the city, he was asking me to improvise. . . . He was daring me to be “black.”
DJ Darky refuses the challenge, but the Schwa goes on to sonically deconstruct “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: “He cannonballed into his own tune, unleashing a voluminous splashing salvo of triplets that shattered and scattered the song into a wave of quarter, half, whole notes that fluttered to the floor in wet, black globular droplets.”2
The post–civil rights urge, expressed by DJ Darky, to declare blackness “over” reads as naive and stubbornly misguided. But the Schwa’s performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and his deconstruction and rearticulation of it in a scattered landscape seems right. It is not intact as it once was. The pundit Touré argued in his book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? that blackness was being redefined in the twenty-first century, such that everything that any single black person did constituted black culture. But that couldn’t be right. That definition would make black culture essentially meaningless and too dependent upon the technical “fact” that someone was defined as black, an individualistic form
of essentialism, rather than the stuff of black life. Beatty describes postblackness better. The Schwa’s droplets display molecular cohesion, they both gather and splatter in different directions.
Visual artist and musician Sanford Biggers has performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with his band Moon Medicine. In one performance, they wore white hazmat jumpsuits splattered with neon paint: “Their faces were hidden behind gold rubber masks that were bent out of shape with large lips protruding ominously. But even if their faces were hidden, it was clear they were having fun. At one point, they spoke the lyrics of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ to the tune of Prince’s ‘Controversy,’ flashed the lyrics, the word ‘controversy’ and all sorts of found footage, from vintage war clips to Miley Cyrus grinding against Robin Thicke at [the] Grammys.”