The song has been sung at protests from Seattle to Delaware Stanford alumni recorded a socially distanced choral version, while the oboist Titus Underwood led a symphonic version featuring an all-Black orchestra. “It’s like saying, ‘If we can get through all of that, we can transcend even this moment of atrocity.”īatiste is one of many who are turning to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in this current moment. “When you play that song, people rise up and stand together and remember all that we have gone through,” he says. He and his band opened the procession with the song, and then played it four to five times along the way, with marchers singing along. ![]() When George Floyd was killed by Minnesota police earlier this year, Batiste organized a musical protest in New York, marching from Union Square to Washington Square Park. “It connects us to the history of all the people who we stand on the shoulders of-who have marched and fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy and that we’re trying to improve upon,” he says. Following King’s assassination, a crowd in Roxbury, Mass., sang the song, with Reverend Virgil Wood declaring, “We will not sing the anthem that has dishonored us, but we will sing the one that has honored us.”īut Batiste also recognizes the more somber aspects of the song, especially given that his grandfather, who was the president of a New Orleans postal workers union, often marched to the song at Civil Rights protests. In Forever We Stand, Perry writes that by the late ’60s, “We Shall Overcome” “seemed naive and even insipid in comparison to the reach for soul and the deliberate invocation of the African continent and diaspora.”Īs a new generation of Black activists, artists and politicians rose to the fore in the ’70s, they adopted “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a symbol of resistance. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” however, would soon regain its urgency, as harrowing police violence and unwavering systems of segregation would mar the early pacifist optimism of the Civil Rights Movement. But as folk music rose to the fore, the song was soon supplanted by a new wave of freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” whose simple and direct choruses were sung with fervor at marches from Selma to Washington. When the Civil Rights Era began in the 1950s, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was sung during organizational meetings for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and quoted in speeches by Dr. Maya Angelou, in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recalled singing the song with her Black classmates in Oakland as a rejoinder to a visiting racist white politician. In 1929, it was sung in support of the unionization of Black porters In 1936, it opened the first conference of the National Negro Congress, an anti-fascist organization fighting for Black liberation. “I sang the Negro National Anthem when my tooth was hurting because of an exposed cavity-I sang the Negro National Anthem when I did not know there was a future for a little black girl with twelve sisters and brothers.” A symbol of resistanceĪs Black activists continued to mobilize in their fight against discrimination and segregation, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” took on an increasingly political bent, symbolizing defiance in the face of white oppression. “I sang the Negro National Anthem when I was hungry,” Congresswoman Maxine Waters wrote in Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, edited by Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson. In 1919, the NAACP named it its official song James Weldon Johnson would be appointed the organization’s first African American executive secretary a year later.īefore long, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would become, in Perry’s words, “a universal signifier of Black identity.” It was sung at church services, civic organization meetings, pageants and graduations it anchored Emancipation Day and Negro History Week celebrations and daily school rituals. ![]() ![]() ![]() As the song was passed along communally, it was also boosted by powerful Black leaders and organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and Booker T.
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