For her piece, a larger than life, harp-like structure made out of sculptures of African American singers held up and cradled by an oversized hand, she chose the title “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (later renamed “The Harp” against her will). Its importance in the pre-WWII world is embodied by Harlem Renaissance artist and sculptor Augusta Savage, who was chosen as only one of four women and one of two African Americans to present work at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was sung in most every context of public or private life-in school assemblies, at dances and conventions, during meetings, at church, public clubs, and more. It was carried to new audiences every time it was sung in private or public gatherings, evolving through both formal and informal means-finally gaining significant recognition in 1920 when the NAACP chose it as the official song of the organization. Black newspapers and journals reprinted the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” shortly after the commemoration ceremony, and by the 1920s the song could be found pasted inside the back covers of hymnals across the country. Today, the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.”īy 1935, at the time Johnson was looking back at the song’s development, “Lift Every Voice” had taken on a universally revered role in African American communities. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it, they went off to other schools and sang it, they became teachers and taught it to other children. ”Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. Not expecting “Lift” to become anything other than a one-time musical tribute, Johnson reminisced years later: Rosamond Johnson, put the poem to music and a choir of 500 Stanton School children sang it at the event. The man who later became a famed writer of the Harlem Renaissance, the head of the NAACP, US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the first African American professor to be hired at New York University, wrote the poem for a local commemoration ceremony of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), was principal at the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida when he wrote the lyrics in 1900. It sustained us and helped us to carry on.”īy the time soldiers sang it on the battlefields of World War II, the words and music of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” had already been a beacon in struggles past, carried on from school children to hymn books to most every African American household in the United States. When the morale of our troops was low, as it often was, we sang our Negro National Anthem. Army to preserve world freedom and liberty. Rosamond Johnson stayed with me when I served with the brave enlisted men and officers of the Negro 366th Infantry Combat Regiment in Italy fighting in World War II in a segregated U.S. ”The stirring words of James Weldon Johnson and the soul-gripping music of his brother J. He quotes the late Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA), the first African American popularly elected to the US Senate, about Brooke’s recollection of the song’s role in World War II: In his aptly titled book Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem 100 Years, 100 Voices, then-chairman of the NAACP Julian Bond offers a historical reconstruction of the process by which the famous hymn became associated with the Civil Rights movement.
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