May We Forever Stand

by Imani Perry

  23. James D. Anderson, “The Historical Context for Understanding the Test Score Gap,” National Journal of Urban Education and Practice 1, no. 1 (2007): 1–21.

  24. Johnson, Along This Way.

  25. Ibid., 163.

  26. See James B. Crooks, Jacksonville after the Fire, 1901–1919 (Jacksonville, Fla.: Alibris, 1990).

  27. Steve Kramer, “Uplifting Our ‘Downtrodden Sisterhood’: Victoria Earle Matthews and New York City’s White Rose Mission, 1897–1907,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 243–66.

  28. See Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro.

  29. “Victoria Earle Matthews Writes of Two Rising Sons of Florida: The Success of the Johnson Brothers—A Musician and Litterateur,” Colored American, May 11, 1901, 10.

  30. “They Celebrated Emancipation Day,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 2, 1903, 2.

  31. See Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 91, 92.

  32. “Colored Commencement Exercises,” El Paso Herald, May 6, 1905, 8.

  33. Keith Cartwright, Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 81.

  34. Evelyn Fairbanks, Days of Rondo (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1990), 130–31.

  35. Written interview with Jason Moran, March 22, 2015.

  36. See a discussion of this history in Glaude, Exodus!

  37. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172095 (retrieved December 13, 2015).

  38. This analysis of the music of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was greatly aided by musician Linda Mason Hood’s blog, truffles, turtles & tunes. While her rendering is far more technically sophisticated than what I can offer, her knowledge was essential for this work. http://truffles-turtles-tunes.blogspot.com/2007/04/musical-analysis-of-lift-evry-voice-and.html.

  39. John Rosamond Johnson, “Why They Call American Music Ragtime,” reprinted in The Black Perspective in Music 4, no. 2, bicentennial number (July 1976): 263.

  40. Lynn Abbot and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); “LaVilla: The Rise and Fall of a Great Black Neighborhood,” MetroJacksonville, December 12, 2014. Also see Paul Oliver, “The Long-Tailed Blue: Songsters of the Road Shows,” in Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  41. “How Actors Figured at the Business League,” Freeman (Indianapolis) 18, no. 35 (1905): 5; a reference to the conference from the New York Age on August 2, 1905, 1, refers to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as “The Negro Anthem.”

  42. See generally Kathleen Crocker and Jane Currie, Chautauqua Institution, 1874–1974 (New York: Arcadia, 2001); and Jeffrey Simpson, Chautauqua: An American Utopia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).

  43. Nathan B. Young, “A Negro Chautauqua,” Independent, August 3, 1893; “For a Negro Chautauqua,” Washington Bee, August 20, 1910, 1.

  44. Betsy Riley, “Ladies of the Club,” Atlanta Magazine, December 2, 2013, http://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/ladies-of-the-club/ (last retrieved December 13, 2015).

  45. Oral History Interview with Grace Towns Hamilton, July 19, 1974, interview G-0026, Southern Oral History Program Collection (no. 4007), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library; Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association (Washington, D.C.: National Educational Association, 1975), 40.

  46. Interview with Cheryl Goffney Franklin, Chautauqua Institution, August 5, 2014.

  47. Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Dawson uses “linked fate” to describe the belief among African Americans that their fate is linked to others of their racial group, and that therefore they ought to cast their lots together in political decision making.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic, March 1925, 631.

  2. 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.

  3. Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” 631.

  4. Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 6.

  5. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  6. Chi-Yue Chiu and Ying-Yi Hong, Social Psychology of Culture (New York: Psychology, 2013), 305.

  7. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 88.

  8. Martin Delany (1812–85), an abolitionist, writer, and doctor, is known as the father of black nationalist thought.

  9. Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 96.

  10. Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009).

  11. Ibid., 103. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Black Star Line,” Crisis, September 1922, 210–14.

  12. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 34.

  13. Ibid., 58.

  14. Ibid., 23, 68.

  15. Ibid., 60.

  16. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction, 1968), 244.

  17. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 60.

  18. Florida Times Union, December 21, 1897, James Weldon Johnson Collection.

  19. Lynn Adelman, “A Study of James Weldon Johnson,” Journal of Negro History 52, no. 2 (April 1967): 141; Walter Francis White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995 [1948]), 33–34.

  20. Sean Dennis Cashman, America Ascendant: From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR in the Century of American Power, 1901–1945 (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 109.

  21. Despite her husband’s overseas assignments, Ida Gibbs Hunt continued to be active in the civil rights movement. In 1905, she joined a handful of black women in founding the first Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) for African Americans, in Washington, D.C. She participated in the Niagara Movement, the Femmes de France, the Bethel Literary Society, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Washington Welfare Association, the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, and the Red Cross.

  While traveling abroad with her husband, Hunt published various articles and wrote reviews on literary and cultural themes. She also wrote and gave speeches in support of peace, women’s suffrage, and civil rights for African Americans. She was able to promote her ideals internationally, an influence no doubt from her husband and father, who had been diplomats. Hunt was the assistant secretary for the Second Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. She delivered a paper titled “The Coloured Races and the League of Nations” at the Third Pan-African Congress in London in 1923 and cochaired the conference’s executive committee with W. E. B. DuBois. Hunt died in Washington, D.C., on December 19, 1957.

  22. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 11, The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 12, The Caribbean Diaspora, November 1927–August 1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 50.

  23. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 12, November 1927–August 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 50.

  24. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2, 27 August 1919–August 1920 (Berkeley: Universit
y of California Press, 1983), 642.

  25. Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), 17.

  26. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, 1826–August 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 220.

  27. Elliot M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 17.

  28. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, 1826–August 1919, 376. Article clipping from the West Indian (Grenada), February 28, 1919.

  29. James Weldon Johnson, “Self-determining Haiti,” August 28, 1920, reprinted in www.thenation.com, https://www.thenation.com/article/self-determining-haiti/, March 18, 2004.

  30. Carrie Allen McCray, Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter (New York: Algonquin, 1998), 201.

  31. Ernest Lyon, “Dr. Lyon Scores Notion of Negro National Anthem in Open Letter to James Weldon Johnson,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 19, 1926.

  32. James Weldon Johnson, “Music of Negro National Anthem More Beautiful Than ‘America’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’” Baltimore Afro-American, June 19, 1926.

  33. “Missouri Side Notes by Marian,” Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kans.), March 4, 1949.

  34. “Rabbi Stephen S. Wise Lauds Negro Anthem,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 5, 1928.

  35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 145.

  36. Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 63.

  37. Crisis, November 1924, 30. Also Willis Richardson, ed., Carter G. Woodson, Plays and Pageants from the Life of a Negro (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1993 [1930]).

  38. “The Pageant Proved to Be Greatest in History of Wichita,” Negro Star (Wichita, Kans.), March 13, 1925; “‘Milestones’ Musical and Dramatic Pageant: Five Hundred in Cast in Kansas City, Kansas,” Kansas City Advocate, May 8, 1925, 1.

  39. Richardson, Carter G. Woodson, 324.

  40. Langston Hughes, “Youth,” printed in Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic, March 1925, 631; Dolan Hubbard, ed., The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 5.

  41. Gwendolyn Bennett, “To Usward,” Crisis, May 1924, 19.

  42. Georgia Douglass Johnson, “Homely Philosophy: The Gift of Song,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 2, 1926.

  43. Michael Harper, ed., The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 116.

  44. Robert B. Stepto, “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narrative, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives,” in From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

  45. Countee Cullen, One Way to Heaven (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 150.

  46. Mrs. Burton Kingsland, The Book of Good Manners: Etiquette for All Occasions (New York: Doubleday, 1904), 64.

  47. Mason Stokes, “There Is Heterosexuality: Jessie Fauset, W. E. B. DuBois, and the Problem of Desire,” African American Review 44, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 67–83.

  48. Dubose Heyward, “Mamba’s Daughters: The Last Installment,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 1, 1930.

  49. Quoted in Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson, eds., Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, 100 Years, 100 Voices (New York: Random House, 2000), 309.

  50. “Fredrick [sic] Douglass Celebration,” Plaindealer (Topeka, Kans.), February 18, 1927.

  51. W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (Boston: Da Capo, 1991), 120.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid., 122.

  54. Ibid., 255.

  55. Vivian Schuyler, letter to W. E. B. DuBois, August 2, 1927, W. E. B. DuBois Papers, University of Massachusetts Library, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b040-i539/#page/1/mode/1up.

  56. Vivian Schuyler, letter to W. E. B. DuBois, November 19, 1927, W. E. B. DuBois Papers, University of Massachusetts Library, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b177-i235/#page/1/mode/1up.

  57. Crystal A. Britton, Vivian Schuyler Key: One of Many Voices (Hempstead, N.Y.: Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford Stuyvesant History, 1990); Amy Helene Kirschke, ed., Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

  58. Dina Hampton, Little Red: Three Passionate Lives through the Sixties and Beyond (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 168.

  59. Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922), 53.

  60. “Labor Chief Pleads Cause of Porters,” Chicago Defender (national ed.), August 10, 1929, retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/492211044?accountid=13314.

  61. An international outcry followed the indictment of nine black teenagers in Scottsboro, Alabama, for allegedly raping two white women, one of whom later recanted her testimony. Eight of the nine received death sentences. They were defended by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party, although they were also courted by the NAACP. Although several appeals were unsuccessful, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Powell v. Alabama, 87 U.S. 45 (1932), reversed the convictions and remanded the cases to the state for retrial. The state of Alabama then retried one of the accused, Haywood Patterson, and once again convicted him, but Judge James Horton set aside that verdict. Alabama tried him again and sentenced him to seventy-five years. They also retried Clarence Norris and sentenced him to death, but in 1935 the Supreme Court overturned that conviction in Norris v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45. Multiple trials and reconvictions led to such an enormous public outcry that Alabama released the four youngest defendants after they had served six years in prison.

  62. Charles Gaines, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (a parody of the Negro National Anthem), Afro-American, November 12, 1932, 6.

  63. Community Church of Boston, event program, January 12, 1936, W. E. B. DuBois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Libraries.

  64. Walter L. Daykin, “Nationalism as Expressed in Negro History,” Social Forces 13, no. 2 (December 1934): 257–63.

  65. Ibid.

  66. T. G. Standing, “Nationalism in Negro Leadership,” American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 2 (September 1934): 180–92.

  67. Ibid.

  68. “Will Dies Committee Probe Propaganda Aimed at Negro,” Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kans.), March 17, 1939.

  69. Quoted in Bond and Wilson, Lift Every Voice and Sing, 277.

  70. Margaret Walker, This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 6.

  71. Houston A. Baker, “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,” in “Modernist Culture in America,” special issue, American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 95.

  72. From Richard Powell, “African American Art,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  73. Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African American Women Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 105.

  74. Ibid.

  75. Augusta Savage to Grace Nail Johnson, March 21, 1939, James Weldon Johnson Papers.

  76. “Protest Name Given Famous Sculpture by New York World’s Fair Officials,” Negro Star, March 31, 1939, 3.

  77. Rick Benjamin, liner notes, From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Musical Odyssey of Joe Jordan (New World Records, 2006).

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Nikitah Imani, The Agony of Education: Black Students at a White University (London: Routledge, 2014), 10.

/>   2. Proceedings and Debates of the . . . Congress, 121, part 19, Congressional Record (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 218.

  3. Betty Jameson Reed, School Segregation in Western North Carolina: A History, 1860s–1970 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 24.

  4. See generally James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

  5. Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association (Washington, D.C.: National Educational Association, 1975), 45.

  6. Rudolph Byrd, ed., The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Random House, 2008), xv.

  7. G. W. Trenholm, “Status of Negro Education in Alabama,” in Perry, History of the American Teachers Association, 57.

  8. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association, 35.

  9. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Williams, Self-Taught, 95.

  10. Ellen Weiss, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington (Montgomery, Ala.: New South, 2012), 122; Clement Richardson, The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race, vol. 1 (Montgomery, Ala.: National, 1919); Macon County, Alabama Archives and Current History: A Monthly Magazine of the New York Times, April–September 1922, 232.

  11. See Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South.

  12. W. E. B. DuBois, The Common School and the Negro American, Report of a Social Study Made by Atlanta University under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, with the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, on Tuesday, May 30, 1911, nos. 15–20 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1911), nos. 15–20 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1911), 8.

  13. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association, 33.

  14. Weiss, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee, 127; Samuel L. Smith, Builders of Goodwill: The Story of State Agents of Negro Education in the South, 1910–1950 (Nashville: Tennessee Book, 1950), 12.