The song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Rosamond Johnson. The song marked a new century of African American life post-Emancipation. James wrote the lyrics as a modern-day hymn of African American experience birthed from the past of enslavement, the failed struggles of Reconstruction, and the present’s lifted hopes for the future of Black liberation and equality in the United States. Starting in 1901, when “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was first performed in Jacksonville, Florida, to the present day, the hymn’s performance represents 400 years of struggle and hope. It became known as “the Negro National Anthem” and later, “the Black National Anthem,” by which it is known today.

In the wake of Reconstruction’s death, African American artists, educators, and community leaders advanced a morality-based program of progress for the masses of African Americans called “racial uplift.” Racial uplift grew out of African American social structures such as the church, reform movements, and other public institutions to advance the idea of African American collective progress. Through accomplishment and self-help, a Black middle class would elevate the social, moral, and political standing of all African Americans through their individual accomplishments and privileges. This “best foot forward” racial politics extended to African American cultural accomplishments. Literature and the arts were regarded as a strategy for uplift. The historian David Levering Lewis refers to the effort by Black artists and authors as an attempt to achieve “civil rights by copyright.” Through literature, poetry, and music, as well as the visual arts, they would demonstrate the intellectual equality of African Americans. Endeavors to publish, to demonstrate literacy, and to create literary culture were seen by the African American middle class as a strategy to achieve full citizenship rights. A song like the Johnson brothers’ “Lift Every Voice and Sing” asserted the literary and political relevance of African Americans in the life of modern America.

The Johnsons wrote the song as part of a February 12, 1901, celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” began modestly, on the Johnson family home’s front porch in Jacksonville, where James was principal of the Stanton School, the city’s grade school for African Americans. Originally slated to give a speech at the event, he wrote these lyrics instead:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

James chose to write about the descendants of the emancipated, rather than Lincoln the Great Emancipator. The song grew to national and later international prominence through its vocalization by the voices of 500 Jacksonville children. Johnson described its collaborative composition with his brother, its composer: “We planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises [celebrating Lincoln]. We planned, better still, to have it sung by schoolchildren—a chorus of five hundred voices.”[1] Johnson reflected that having composed the first stanza, “the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me”: he found himself overcome with emotion—tears, ecstasy, and serene joy. Rosamond (as his brother was called) set it to music.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” acknowledges the past of enslavement and suffering to make way for a resilient hope, one that sustains and directs us on the path toward liberty. While not yet fulfilled—not in 1900, not now—the song emphasizes the truth of faith, homeland, and the quest for a fully realised liberty: “Let us march on till victory is won.” Despite harsh racism, poverty, and oppression, African Americans and any who are oppressed will strive for a better day and keep their faith in justice and “a new day begun.”

After the celebration, the Johnson brothers moved away from Jacksonville to pursue successful careers in New York’s musical theater scene. “The song passed out of our minds,” James Weldon Johnson reflected in his 1933 autobiography, Along This Way. “But the schoolchildren kept singing the song; some of them went off to other schools and kept singing it; some of them became schoolteachers and taught it to their pupils. Within twenty years the song was being sung in schools and churches and on special occasions throughout the South and in some other parts of the country.” Johnson believed that the song’s widest circulation came through copies pasted in the backs of hymnals and songbooks used in Sunday schools, YMCAs, and similar institutions.[2]

The Johnson brothers took great pains to refer to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as the “Negro National Hymn,” not “anthem.” (“The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official US national anthem in 1931.) James insisted it was a “hymn.” He stated, “A nation can have but one anthem and our anthem is the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’”[3] But the brothers fully understood the inequality that moved African Americans in particular to embrace “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as an anthem. It represented their experiences in the nation as a people apart.

The song has emerged at key moments in the national conscience over the twentieth century to reveal anxieties over Black citizenship and Black voices of critique. The survival of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for 120-plus years of expression in various contexts, sung by Black and white people, children and adults, conveys the continued harshness of racism. The song asks us to reckon with the many experiences and voices within an incomplete democracy. It also shows the hopefulness that as a nation, we learn about the many voices and experiences that attach themselves to the song.

“Nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being part creator of this song,” Johnson wrote. “I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children. I am lifted up on their voices, and I am also carried back and enabled to live through again the exquisite emotions I felt at the birth of the song. My brother and I, in talking, have often marvelled at the results that have followed what we considered an incidental effort,” James wrote. We continue to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for its gift of song and its promise of hope. It articulates the faith and creative survival of African American lives, and many more lives besides, and for the continued quest for liberty and equality. Beginning with this song, and through the next three decades of his life as an author of editorials, poetry, autobiography, history, and anthologies of poetry and music, Johnson affirmed the power of expression and scholarship to elevate African Americans as equal participants in an evolving democratic project.