Maya Angelouwrote in her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, that students sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at her eighth grade graduation ceremony. Where else has the Black national anthem appeared in pop culture? # Shana Redmond, a professor at UCLA who studies music, race and politics and author of the book Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, told NPR, “It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources.” She added, “It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change. “And for that matter many Africans in the diaspora struggled through to get to a place of hope.” “It spoke to the history of the dark journey of African-Americans,” current NAACP president Derrick Johnson told NPR. The lyrics also contain Biblical references, specifically to the book of Exodus, which chronicled the Jews’ journey out of Egypt, where they had been enslaved. The lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” refer to the Black struggles of slavery and systemic oppression. What do the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” mean? # God of our weary years,God of our silent tears,Thou who has brought us thus far on the way Thou who has 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. 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 feetCome 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 lastWhere the white gleam of our bright star is cast. Lift every voice and singTill earth and heaven ring,Ring with the harmonies of Liberty Let our rejoicing riseHigh 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 begunLet us march on till victory is won. The lyrics to the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” are as follows: What are the lyrics to the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing?” # In 1934, he was the first Black American hired at New York University and later taught at the historically Black Fisk University. consul to Nicaragua and Venezuela under President Theodore Roosevelt. He worked with the NAACP from 1917 to 1930 and served as a U.S. James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the Black national anthem, was an author, educator, activist, diplomat, lawyer and songwriter. The NAACP adopted the song as the Black national anthem in 1919. The song was first performed by 500 children at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Fla., where Weldon Johnson was the principal, to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. At this time, Jim Crow was replacing slavery. James Weldon Johnson wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a poem, and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, set the poem to music in 1899. The Black national anthem is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” sometimes stylized as “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” What is the origin of the Black national anthem? # For many who weren’t familiar with the song, its history or its significance, here’s what you need to know about the Black national anthem and why it’s so important this Black History Month.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |