Perry - May we forever stand: a history of the black national anthem

O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels lyre?

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?

MAYA ANGELOU

There he was, busily moving about his toys and happily humming.

Do you know what that song is? I asked him.

Yes, its the Black National Anthem!

Where did you learn it?

At school.

He walked away. I was surprised. My eldest son was then in kindergarten at a predominantly white, mostly upper-middle-class Quaker elementary school. Like many other middle-class black parents I lived with a quiet nervousness about whether my child would grow up to have an adequate appreciation for black culture given his environment. But here he was, singing our precious song.

Even I, thirty-one years older than him, hadnt learned the song in school. Id picked it up at countless Martin Luther King Jr. memorial events, at churches, reading Ebony Jr. magazine, attested. But my children were something much closer to being to the manor born. It hadnt quite occurred to me just how much I worried about the losses entailed in privilege until I felt jubilant that my son knew Lift Every Voice and Sing. His childhood might have passed without it.

Every Thanksgiving we travel to Birmingham, Alabama, to celebrate the holiday with our extended family. Dozens of us gather in the den, huddled close together on a wraparound sofa, a few chairs, and some of us on the floor. That fall when my first born was in kindergarten and my baby was two years old we were grieving the loss of my grandmother. She was my familys guiding force. Sadness lingered. Spontaneously, I asked my son to share the song hed been learning in school. He stood and began to sing. Before he finished the first line, everyone in my mothers generation stood up with him and raised their right arms with solid black power fists. His eyes widened like saucers and mine filled with tears.

I wondered how my grandmother, who was born in 1917, would have responded in that moment. What would she have remembered about the song if she had been there with us in the flesh? Four generations of my family, at least, have lived with this anthem. Each generation, each individual, knows this song in a distinctive manner. We discovered it in our coming of age and in the varied orbits of our lives. I thought of a great aunt of mine whom I never met named Avie Kibble Lovely. Avie served in World War II, against her husbands wishes, and she collapsed and died while out canvassing for the NAACP in 1963, back when it was both illegal and treated like a seditious organization in Alabama. For years I wished I had known her, but I now know enough to recognize that I stand in her legacy just as I stand in that of my grandmother and the other women and men of that generation and the one before in my family; people to whom I owe not just my existence but my way of being in the world. My ancestors took in laundry and cleaned others peoples houses for a pittance, then dragged themselves home to tend to their own. They pushed ploughs, canned vegetables, and hung meat on ceiling hooks in the smokehouse, aproned and exhausted. They sent their children on long walks to one-room schoolhouses to learn and dream, all the while scrubbing floors and picking cotton and serving. They donned their Sunday best to begin each week and loved and lived a grace that those who were white and powerful tried to steal away. This song, that I know, coursed through all the details of their lives that I will never know. It rang through lives out of which I have been made. The words connect them to me, and me to them. In this, I am not alone. The contemporary jazz artist Jason Moran described his decision to record the song to me in this way: I recorded the song because I was coming out of a focus on the blues. My album Same Mother was about that, and the recording Artist in Residence was mainly a catalog of commissions. So, the song actually didnt really have a place, but I felt compelled to record it because I thought it connected the materials. On the recording it follows Rain, which was a commission centering on the ring shout. So, how to connect these songs that reflect our past and our possibility? Does that make sense? I also like that the song was written for one reason, the assignment on Lincoln, and then 50 years later, the song gains a totally new context. Its a piece that doesnt sit still, and in that way, defines it as a brilliant composition.

In other words, it is our common thread.

By the time my younger son was in kindergarten and also came home singing Lift Every Voice and Sing, century. The reader will also encounter vignettes that show how the song was situated in the midst of varying social and political moments, as well as individual lives. A picture will also emerge of black civic, educational, and political life. Although not comprehensive, it should give a rich picture of the world and people the anthem described.

When I first began telling people what I was doing with this book, more than a few editors and scholars questioned whether I would have enough to write about. But I wasnt frustrated that so many others didnt get it. It simply indicated to me how little people understood of the robust history of this song, and the culture in which it was situated. Their doubt fueled my commitment to write this story. Rather than not enough, I had too much, over 9,000 documented references, very few of which had ever been discussed in scholarly literature, to pore over in order to write this book. I have tried to organize the story they revealed, and to streamline it by choosing representative examples and stories of how Lift Every Voice and Sing was used and embraced throughout the book. This song was part of a wide range of various political, cultural, and social moments and historical currents.