Lift every voice and sing

Lift every voice and sing

We sang this at two of our services this morning. After the first one, a gentleman asked me why we had sung it; he did not think it was appropriate to sing such an “imperial, triumphalistic” hymn.

Well, if you look at the words and don't know the background, it could seem that way. And it could seem strange to sing it.

So, I told him. And I told the congregation at the later service, because those days of segregation and Jim Crow and the civil rights marches and sit-down strikes that brought change are just something in the history books for a lot of people; it was a long time ago....


“It's about time they shot that ni____ .”
That was the first comment I heard when the news reports told us that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed in Memphis, back in that April of 1968. It was a sentiment widely shared among white people in the South.

It was how I felt about it.

I was a teenager. Our schools were still segregated, and we wanted them to stay that way. It was how it was, how it had always been. It was right. Wasn't it?

The black children in our county (there were not many of them, and they were largely invisible to us white people) all had to get on buses (the cast-offs from the Board of Education, after they were too worn out for the white children) and ride to the one “Negro School” in the county. A school that didn't have much in the way of books and supplies. Or food for the lunch room. Or salaries for the teachers, who did their work for the love of the community and the hope for a better day.

But I knew little of that. It was more convenient for us white people to not see how things were. “Separate but equal.” That was good enough, wasn't it? And here was this Mr. King trying to change things. All the northern liberal news media loved him; they made him out to be some kind of saint.

Well, it turns out they were right about that part.

I am not the right person to speak about Dr. King. I am not even the right person to get on the organ bench and play “Lift every voice and sing” as I did this morning. I wish it were otherwise, but racism is still written in my soul. It comes out when I least expect it, and I am afraid that it will be so to my dying day.

But I see the younger generation, where black children and white children can play together, where all the prejudice of the bad old days is gone. Gone. Not a part of them at all. And I rejoice in the Lord.

What I can say is this: Dr. King did as much for us white people in the South as he did for the African-Americans. We were as crippled in our way by Jim Crow and segregation as the black people of our community, and worse, we did not know it. Any time we hate, we are slaves to that hatred, to the devil who thrives on that hatred and feeds it. Any time we choose violence, any time when we use the force available to us to oppress someone else, we are serving the devil, and captive to him. Dr. King did what he could to liberate us white people as well as the black people of this land from what held us in bondage. And, by the grace of God, we have come far.

Another time, I should write about President Lyndon B. Johnson, who also played a large role in these matters, using all of his political clout (and it was considerable) to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 enacted as the law of the land. I could write also of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" which fueled the fires of racism and made the South a Republican bastion to this day.

There is much still to do.


In the year 1900, “Lift every voice and sing” was read as a poem for the first time at a school assembly in Jacksonville, Florida. The young men of the all-black segregated school had contacted James Weldon Johnson, one of the leading African-American poets of his time, and asked him to write something for them on the occasion when the school was hosting Booker T. Washington for the annual Lincoln's Birthday commemoration. Mr. Johnson wrote the poem, and the music was written a few years later by his brother Rosamond Johnson.

It was a good song, and young people soon were singing it at schools elsewhere in Florida, and eventually throughout the South and beyond. At school assemblies, they often would sing the “Star-spangled banner,” and then they would sing this song, which became known as the Negro National Anthem.

I want to do my part to see that this song, and what it represents, is not forgotten.

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.