Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black National Anthem, is both a song and a call to action. It is what you say when you want to pray forward while looking back. I attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest historically Black college in America. Founded in 1854, it was, in its early days, a place for formerly enslaved men to be educated and prepared for service on the mission field. I arrived at Lincoln, knowing most of the words (I did grow up in a Southern Black Baptist church), but I was challenged by our then-president, Dr. Niara Sudarkasa, to memorize them and speak them out loud whenever I needed guidance and grace. When I became a mother, I used to sing this in the morning, getting my sons ready for school.
In 1900, James Weldon Johnson, author and poet, penned the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. It was set to music by his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, and then sung by 500 Black schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, on Lincoln’s birthday It was later adopted by the NAACP and became a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement. It remains a powerful symbol of unity, hope, struggle, and resilience.
On this Tenth Day of Black History Month, I call on everyone—take one intentional moment today to memorize the words. Let them guide your thoughts, strengthen your voice, and inspire your actions. Write them down, speak them aloud, and etch them into your heart.
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.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.
Bending toward social justice,
Karsonya Wise Whitehead
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Copyright Credit: James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” from James Weldon Johnson: Complete Poems, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
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