In 1900, NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson wrote a hymn, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” in celebration of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, with music composed by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. On February 12, 1900, the song was first performed by a choir of 500 children at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, where Johnson also served as principal, 35 years after the death of the president who helped end slavery on January 1, 1863, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
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“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” continued to play on long after that first performance, and call for equality. By 1919, the NAACP began using the song, called “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a “Black national anthem.”
Throughout the decades, the song has continued resurfacing, most recently around the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, and has continued to be performed at sporting events and throughout Black History Month, and around Juneteenth (June 19), commemorating the day slavery ended in America.
On June 19, 2020, Google featured a Juneteenth-themed animation on its home page, featuring a spoken word rendition of the song’s first verse read by LeVar Burton, and the song has been the chosen anthem of Juneteenth celebrations since.
In 2021, Juneteenth was designated a national holiday in 2021 by President Joe Biden. That same year, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn also proposed a bill that would make “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “national hymn” of the United States.
“To make it a national hymn, I think, would be an act of bringing the country together,” said Clyburn. “It would say to people, ‘You aren’t singing a separate national anthem, you are singing the country’s national hymn.’ The gesture itself would be an act of healing. Everybody can identify with that song.”
Throughout the decades, the song has been performed by multiple artists, including Ray Charles, Beeb Winans, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, and Vanessa Williams, among many others.
More than a century after it was written and composed for President Lincoln, the three verses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” have continued to deliver as an ode to black pride, liberation, and a rallying cry for unity.
Read the full story behind “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and its lyrics HERE.
Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
