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“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was initially a poem by James Weldon Johnson.
“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a civil rights hymn that speaks to the religion and resilience of African Americans, was sung for the primary time in 1900 on the top of segregation and lynching.
A century later, Rep. James Clyburn is introducing a invoice in Congress to make it the official nationwide hymn, alongside the nationwide anthem.
“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” has come to be generally known as the “Black national anthem.” Meanwhile, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been extensively criticized lately as a result of it incorporates lyrics that glorify slavery.
“To make it a national hymn, I think, would be an act of bringing the country together. It would say to people, ‘You aren’t singing a separate national anthem, you are singing the country’s national hymn,'” the South Carolina Democrat informed USA Today. “The gesture itself would be an act of healing. Everybody can identify with that song.”
Clyburn is the House Democratic Whip and the highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress. He mentioned he is thought of this effort for years, however determined to revisit it amid intense divisions within the U.S. and the rise of a contemporary civil rights motion.
Reiland Rabaka, the creator of “Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement,” mentioned that “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” displays the “tragedies of the African American experience, but also the triumphs,” and this juxtaposition provides it the “staying power that it has to this day.”
The hymn was initially a poem, written in 1899 by James Weldon Johnson, an African American activist and author.
According to the Library of Congress, the poem was set to music in 1900 by Johnson and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, and was first carried out at a Lincoln Birthday meeting on the Stanton School, a segregated black highschool in Jacksonville, Florida.
Weldon Johnson later grew to become government secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was based in 1909.
There, he was an outspoken voice within the civil rights motion and the battle in opposition to lynching and segregation. In 1920, he was honored by his colleagues who declared “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” because the “the Negro national anthem,” per the Library of Congress.
Rabaka, a professor of African American research on the University of Colorado in Boulder, mentioned that the hymn is symbolic of the New Negro Movement — a time period popularized through the Harlem Renaissance — when a brand new technology of African Americans started to stand up and communicate out.
“This so-called New Negro is going to be representing that first generation of African Americans to come of age in American society that are not in bondage,” Rabaka mentioned. “So they sort of come into the 20th century with this new optimism — that they’re going to be able to really have access to American democracy.”
In fashionable occasions, the hymn has been carried out by celebrities like Beyoncé, was a part of the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and, most not too long ago, it has been sung by Black Lives Matter activists amid protests over racism and police brutality.
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