by Imani Perry
One of Moon Medicine’s recordings of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has been incorporated into Clifford Owens’s performance art pieces. Owens teaches the audience the history of the anthem, why it was written, and then tries to teach them to sing it. Although this seems rather straightforward, in the larger performance piece he responds to other scores as well, and the result is both layered and provocative: “Another score was contributed by Senga Nengudi, who instructed Owens to scatter and sweep coloured sand into the centre of the room. The most controversial of scores was provided by Kara Walker, who ordered Owens to ‘French kiss an audience member. Force them against a wall and demand sex. The audience/viewer should be an adult. If they are willing to participate in the forced sex act abruptly turn the tables and assume the role of victim. Accuse your attacker. Seek help from others, describe your ordeal. Repeat.’”3
In each vignette the provocativeness of the performance becomes an explicit challenge to the piety and formalism traditionally attached to the anthem, and yet in some ways the piece as a whole reminds the viewers of the song’s significance. In Owens’s piece, the performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was the least incendiary of the bunch. Or maybe not. Perhaps asking audiences, in particular white audiences, to sing a black anthem is as much of a challenge as the others. In any case, the question remains, it seems, whether the implied significance of the song is merely in memory or current.
The anthem certainly remains here and there: as inspiration for fabric artist Gwen Magee, as a feature of black banquets and Black History Month events. Touré’s call for “Lift Every Voice” to be displaced by Marvin Gaye’s “Troubleman” as the anthem of black America elicited little reaction or interest. But Paule Marshall’s description of FESTAC was a foreshadowing. The course is unclear. Racial inequality has persisted. It has morphed but remained. Yet there don’t seem to be tangible remedies in law or elections for the persistence of the color line, even as a few black people seem to have escaped its grasp. Something more fundamental about the United States has to be addressed in order to get rid of its deep racism, and we haven’t figured that out at all.
“Things were so much better before desegregation.” Many of us have heard this from black elders, an ironic formulation given how hard they fought to make sure the society’s doors were open to us. Such romantic renderings of the pre-desegregation past as “better” often seem too simplistic. Life was difficult under Jim Crow. Exclusions were pervasive and systematic. Though the society has never come close to achieving racial equality, having the right to vote, to attend schools without explicit legal barriers, to enter into a wide variety of professions, to go to the public library and sit at lunch counters and drive the nation’s roads largely without incident, these are important transformations in our society, hard fought for by black Americans and other believers in racial justice. The nostalgia, however, is real and much of it, I would argue, has to do with the perception that the loss of black associational life and black formalism was the cost of the freedom movement. And it might have been too high a cost. But it wasn’t just desegregation that led to their loss. Americans’ associational life is diminished generally. We are less likely to go to church or to belong to a community group than our grandparents were. We are increasingly private citizens. But it is also the case that the rich interior life of black communities grew thinner as black mobility increased, as did the demands for private rather than community striving. At the same time, the vulnerabilities associated with deindustrialization and mass incarceration and transiency due to eviction that are ever threatening in the life of the black poor also diminish social networks. Longing for what once was—black formalist rituals, black associations, and a fabric of meaning, values, and identity that were solidified with singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—is more than understandable. It is to be expected.
Today, it often seems, our impulse to memorialize landmark marches and civil rights heroes isn’t forward looking. Looking to the past often isn’t a means for understanding the present. Rather, memorialization stands in lieu of the burden of figuring out our time. So it was with the 2010 celebration of civil rights music at the White House. It was a star-studded and televised event, beautiful in its array of talent, and stunning in its symbolism. Morgan Freeman served as the master of ceremonies, Yolanda Adams sang Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and concluded the song by saying, while looking at the president, “A change has come!” The story of this presidency, she seemed to say, was to be thoroughly ensconced in our national mythology of steadily moving toward a more perfect union. The performers sang freedom songs. “This Little Light of Mine” and “Abraham Martin and John” were both led by Smokey Robinson. But then it came time to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The initial plan was for the Howard University Gospel Choir to perform it, but the producer decided at the last minute that it would be more appealing to the television audience if it were sung by celebrities. And so they did. The president, who had been standing in the front, introduced the song and then moved to the back. The celebrities were still jubilant and swaying. But they stumbled over the words. Many hummed, or stopped singing in moments of confused silence. They simply didn’t know it.
In August 2014, Mike Brown, a young black man, was shot in Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left on the ground for four and a half hours, a harrowing repetition of the long American tradition of racial terror, but with his black body splayed on the concrete instead of swinging in a tree. After so many deaths of black people at the hands of police officers, over and over again, black youth in Ferguson said, Enough. They stood in the street, refused, and resisted. They faced down military-grade weapons and tear gas and ignited the imagination of a nation.
In the age of Ferguson and beyond, the freedom songs of the 1960s don’t seem to work. They ring as naive when they were once strong, and as hokey where they were once defiant. Perhaps that is why on one night in Ferguson, protesters sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And then, when Howard University students protested in Washington, D.C., in solidarity with Ferguson, they sang it, too, while wearing shirts and placards that read “Justice for Mike Brown” and “Black Lives Matter.” As students at a historically black college, they are some of the few who today still carry the torch of black formalism. The moment was profound and insistent, but it was nevertheless on unsure ground. How to protest today, how to prepare for struggle, who is in the community of the struggle? These questions are urgent in the twenty-first century. Many of us know we have to act. But the “how” behind it is fitful.
When it was announced that the grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown, people were already gathered at the Westside Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis. Upon learning the news, they elected to remain silent for four and a half minutes: a minute for each hour Mike Brown’s body lay in the street. The pastor read a prayer of forgiveness written by South African bishop Desmond Tutu, and the congregation sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in advance of a twenty-four-hour prayer vigil.
In Baltimore, less than a year later, Freddie Gray was arrested for possession of a switch blade. After a “rough ride” to the precinct, Gray was in a coma. He died seven days later from his injuries. Again, people took to the street. The choreography of the aftermath of his death was a truncated dance of black American politics from the mid-1960s to the present. We saw black political power in the form of elected officials who were unable to address the pervasive poverty and marginalization of their constituents. We saw violent and enraging policing. We saw media that demonized the least of these when they wailed their frustration and pain. We watched. Prince went to do a benefit concert. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra put on a special performance called “One Baltimore” that included “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around,” pop star Rihanna’s “Stay,” as well as an audience participatory version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
In 2015, during Black History Mont
h, convocations, and memorial services, the song came back with the melancholy and steeliness of the moment, but also with trepidation. There was some hopefulness in response to the way black people and others, in both the United States and abroad, were choosing in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, to publicly refuse waves of racist violence, persistent inequality, and economic despair by organizing and protesting. The digital age has made the world smaller. Having political concerns that are global can reinvigorate, and is being reinvigorated. And yet, those who care are heartbroken again each time they witness the next tragedy, and the next, and the next. I, like many other people, find singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” alongside other people of conscience to be one bulwark against a pessimism that threatens to descend at every turn. But when I look around the room and see so many closed mouths, or eyes focused on the page, nervous gestures, I am reminded not to be deceived about the moment in which we live, grasping somewhat randomly into traditions and their archives and yet in desperate need of rebuilding tradition, or building anew.
There is no song that touches me so deeply, but while the Black National Anthem (or Negro National Hymn), “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” is powerful, we should not be sentimentally attached to it or any other composition just for tradition’s sake. Despite the fact that I have spent an entire book on this song, I cannot conclude with a call for us to revive “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Rather, the ways of being that appear in the traditions of singing the anthem continue to matter. The features of black formalism matter, too, though I suspect the “form” of formalism will continue to change and perhaps won’t merit the same title. Perhaps it won’t be rooted so firmly in a national racial identity and will instead be based at the crossroads of local concerns and collectives. Or maybe there is something to be developed from the growing interest in international black politics and a shrinking globe. I am not a prophet. My point is, however, that people need interdependence and community that affirms their value and position in the world, counterpublics and public arenas that set values that contest the inequality and injustice that continue to fester. As social beings we flourish when all of this is part of our regular life rituals. We learn to be through repetition. We are who we are through the regularity of our doings. And so, I conclude with a call for a return to an active associational life, to deliberately being and doing together. That is what must be encouraged and revived. The path is rugged, the lantern light dim. That ritual community, that deliberate meaning-making and learning, that repetition, meditation, and fellow feeling, that epic story, that sense of courage, inspiration, promise, and resilience, that love and beauty that once sustained black struggle in song—we need them now just as much as we did in 1900. May they, may we, forever stand.
Acknowledgments
To borrow from the inimitable Alabaman Margaret Walker, this book is for my people. And it is of them. I mean specifically the black South and its diaspora. This book is also a “but for my people” work, meaning it exists because of the grace of others as much if not more than as a result of my own labor.
My editor, Mark Simpson-Vos, has been an absolute delight to work with, and I couldn’t imagine better hands for bringing it to the world.
My wonderful, generous, and brilliant colleagues and students in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University have talked and thought with me through this research and writing journey. I must express especial gratitude to our chair and my friend, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., for reading every draft and asking probing and powerful questions about both substance and form, every step of the way.
The generous feedback I’ve received about this project from people at various colleges, universities, and high schools that have invited me to speak has been wonderful: particular thanks to the faculty, students, and community members in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University, in the University of Pennsylvania Departments of English and African American Studies, in the Carter G. Woodson Center at the University of Virginia, in the Stanford University Department of African American Studies, and at Rowan University. Beyond those in-person encounters, scholars working in the field of the history of black education, especially James D. Anderson, Heather Andrea Williams, Michael Fultz, Vanessa Siddle Walker, and the forerunner Thelma D. Perry (along with the many others cited in this book), have provided me with essential models for the methodological approach I have taken here. This book rests on their shoulders, and on the many others who have devoted their lives to mining, culling, and sharing black institutional, cultural, and social history.
So many friends encouraged me as I wrote this book, too many to name but all remembered. Among them, Michele Alexandre, Ashon Crawley, the late Byron Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin, my coparent Christopher Murphy Rabb, Nate Thompson, Cheryl Jones Walker, and Simone White, who listened so intently and offered sources and stories that mattered.
My extended Perry family, along with my mother, gave me the tools to know what I should be looking for in order to bring this story to life. They are a group of people who are intellectually sharp, deeply loving, soulful, imaginative, creative, and hard-working. I hope to make them proud.
I have learned that after the deaths of beloveds, grief never leaves, but thankfully that means neither do the departed: I am grateful every day for the presence of my grandmother Neida Garner Perry, my father, Steven S. Whitman, and my aunts Phyllis Perry Paxton and Barbara Harris.
To my children, Issa Garner Rabb and Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb: Your kindness, brilliance, and luminous spirits lift and encourage me every day. You are my greatest gifts and my deepest inspirations. May you both soar and find gentle and enchanting landings. May we, as a family, always remember those who made a way for us and honor their legacy in both word and deed.
Notes
PREFACE
1. Ebony Jr. magazine was a children’s magazine published from 1973 to 1985 by the Johnson Publishing Company, which also published the popular black magazines Ebony and Jet.
2. Though in the original verse and composition the song title is written “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” I refer to it in this book as “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” primarily because references to the song in literature and news over the past 115 years more often refer to it this way.
3. Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Timothy Askew, Cultural Hegemony and African American Patriotism: An Analysis of the Song (Ronkonkoma, N.Y.: Linus, 2010); Keith Cartwright, Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Julian Bond and Sonya Kathryn Wilson, eds., Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, 100 Years, 100 Voices (New York: Random House, 2000).
CHAPTER ONE
1. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (Boston: Da Capo, 1933).
2. See generally Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, A History of the Bahamian People from the Ending of Slavery to the Twenty-First Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
3. See generally Christopher Linsin, “Black Mobility in Florida in the Decades following the Civil War,” Florida Conference of Historians Annual Proceedings 2 (September 1994): 58–80; http://fch.fiu.edu/proceedings.html (retrieved July 9, 2015).
4. Rudolph Byrd, ed., The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Random House, 2008), iii.
5. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
6. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd ed. (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), 7.
7. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
8. Johnson, Along This Way, 143.
9. James B. Crooks, “Changing Face of Jacksonville, Florida: 1900–1910,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4 (April 1984): 439.
10. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro:
From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Boston: Da Capo, 1965), 52.
11. Ibid., 52, 53.
12. Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 6.
13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, book 2, chapter 5 (1835), University of Virginia, “Tocqueville’s America” project website, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/ch2_05.htm (retrieved December 13, 2015); de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Floating, 2008 [1840]), 929. Also see Arthur Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review 1, no. 1 (October 1944): 1–25, for an extended discussion of associational life in the United States.
14. This is a reference to W. E. B. DuBois’s classic description of black life in the United States as existing “behind the veil” and out of view with respect to the larger American populace.
15. Nina Mjagkij, Organizing Black America (London: Routledge, 2013), vi.
16. Johnson, Along This Way, 154.
17. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993),
18. “Mme Katherine’s Summer School Closes,” Savannah Tribune, July 30, 1921, 5.
19. See generally Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); and Tanisha Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
20. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1987), 136.
21. Ibid., 136–37.
22. Hortense Spillers, “Formalism Comes to Harlem,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).