Lift Every Voice and Sing

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1900

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

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Background

Historical Context: Post-Reconstruction

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a poem that James Weldon Johnson wrote during the horrific Post-Reconstruction period in US history.

During Reconstruction—the term for the aftermath of the Civil War and Emancipation—Black Americans were jubilant that their long struggle to gain freedom was over. Federal troops occupied many of the former states of the Confederacy, ensuring that Black freedom became a reality. These troops enforced the civil rights Black Americans gained with the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. Efforts like the Freedman’s Bureau ensured that Black Americans had the educational and financial tools they needed to make the transition from enslavement to citizenship.

During the presidential election of 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes bargained away the gains of 30 years of Reconstruction to win office. When federal troops withdrew from the Southern states, lynchings, poll taxes and tests, and restrictive Jim Crow laws forced Black Americans to become second-class citizens. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” serves as a reminder that Black Americans were living in a terrifying moment of backlash, but they had a cultural tradition of endurance and grit to draw on as they continued their fight for freedom. The poem captures the awe with which the first generation born after slavery saw their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, who survived the transatlantic slave trade and 400 years of enslavement.

Cultural Context: Harbingers of the Harlem Renaissance

James Weldon Johnson is among influential figures who were active during both the late Post-Reconstruction period and the Harlem Renaissance. If the Harlem Renaissance was the flowering, then Johnson and his peers planted and watered the seeds at the turn of the 20th century.

Johnson moved to New York City, one of the central sites of the Harlem Renaissance, in 1901, but he already had deep ties to the city. Johnson writes in his 1933 autobiography that he “was born to be a New Yorker” (Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way. Viking Press, 1933) because his extended family took him on so many trips there that he thought of New York as a second home after Jacksonville, Florida. He notes that “being born for a New Yorker means being born, no matter where, with a love for cosmopolitanism” (Along This Way). He conceived of Black Americans not only as citizens of the United States, but also as a part of a global community of culture-makers.

Johnson’s subsequent work as a composer, writer, and editor helped him make the case that Black American culture was rich but misunderstood. Most people only encountered Black American culture as minstrelsy, whereby Black Americans, their folklore, and their music appear through the distorting lens of racist stereotypes. In Johnson’s 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the protagonist describes the Black sermon, Black oral culture, popular Black music, and popular Black dance as “four things which refute the oft advanced theory that they are an absolutely inferior race, which demonstrate that they have originality and artistic conception” (Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Sherman, French and Company, 1912/1925). During the decades of the 1900s and 1910s, Johnson worked to publicize these demonstrations of Black excellence.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is an anthem that reflects this perspective on Black culture, which is grounded in a history of self-conscious struggle as great as any in world history. “Lift Every and Sing” highlights the importance of Black history to the present, Black self-determination, and the Black freedom struggle as a culturally specific instance of the American quest for liberty. It and Johnson are thus harbingers of the Harlem Renaissance.