Feb 24

This post was submitted by Mary Miller, Director of Making Connections Initiative

James Weldon Johnson, the poet who wrote the words of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (Covenant Hymnal No. 732), was imbued with eclectic talents. Songwriter, diplomat, poet, novelist, journalist, teacher, civil rights leader, he was one of the prime movers in the Harlem Renaissance. Preachers know well his record of negro sermons from the turn of the last century in the collection, “God’s Trombones’, with its popular “The Creation”. Also in the collection is a wonderful essay on the tradition of pastoral prayer before the sermon. Less well known, but moving is his poem honoring the ministry of music in those who inspired him in “O Black and Unknown Bards”.

Johnson tells of the genesis of the hymn known now as “The Black National Anthem”:

“A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamund Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher made mimeograohed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.

Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.

The lines of this song repay me in elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”