Lift Every Voice and Sing

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1900

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Remembering the Past

In “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the speaker rehearses the struggle to reclaim the Black past. Rather than see that past solely as hundreds of years of suffering and oppression, James Weldon Johnson reclaims that past as a source of strength.

The Black past is certainly a source of pain. Johnson’s speaker describes the past as “dark” (Line 7), “gloomy” (Line 19), and a period of “weary years” (Line 22). That past is one marred by violence—the “blood of the slaughtered” (Line 18)—and by the disappointment of failed promise: The gains from Emancipation in 1864 until the end of Reconstruction did not lead to permanent access to the ballot box and participation in state and federal legislative bodies. Given these realities, one could certainly see little to celebrate in the Black past.

However, the past isn’t just about suffering, because one can find the roots of Black resilience in those years as well. One source of endurance is Christian spirituality, which the past “taught” (Line 7) Black Americans. Another source of Black strength may be more literal. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was first performed/published in 1900, four decades after Emancipation, so it is entirely possible that some of the fathers who “sighed” (Line 16) for something like the present were literal fathers. That reference to “fathers” (Line 16) is a reminder that in just one generation, Black Americans made an extraordinary transformation from being enslaved people to being free citizens. The dreams of the past and more recent ancestors set the stage for that freedom.

The Importance of Christian Faith

Before, during, and after enslavement, the Black church was central to how Black Americans conceived of themselves and their place in the United States. Johnson’s references to God and faith are his acknowledgement of the importance of Christianity to Black Americans in their struggle for freedom. Johnson frames that faith in terms of what it can do in both the secular and spiritual realms.

The speaker commands the audience to sing until “earth and heaven ring” (Line 2) because the song has two audiences: A secular one that comprises people inside and outside of Black Americans’ racial community; and a sacred one, the God of the Old and New Testament. The first audience must understand how united Black Americans are in their belief in “Liberty” (Line 3), an ideal that is central to the United States as a representative democracy. When Black Americans cause the “earth” (Line 2) to reverberate with the “harmonies of Liberty” (Line 3), they show their accord with the idealized US citizen, one who is ready to welcome Black Americans as full citizens. This secular faith is the belief that the United States has the potential to be sincere rather than hypocritical in placing liberty at the center of American identity.

Faith also refers to faith in God. Throughout the poem, Johnson uses the idiom of Christian struggle against sin and adversity in the Bible to represent the struggles of Black Americans to overcome enslavement and racism. The entry for the song on Hymnary, a database of Christian worship music, lists 27 likely references to specific Bible scriptures (“Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Hymnary, 2007). Johnson relies on the fact that his contemporaries would have easily caught these references to invoke imagery like the “chast’ning rod” (Line 12), a Biblical reference that also conjures up the physical abuse that was a dehumanizing practice of slavery.

The final stanza is a direct address to God, and also a call to Black Americans to keep both their secular and spiritual faith intact. God in this stanza protects and provides guidance as Black Americans make their way from oppression to freedom. There is some tension between the sacred and the secular, however. When the speaker prays that God will keep Black Americans from “stray[ing] from the places” (Line 28) of worship and shield them from becoming “drunk with the wine of the world” (Line 29), it is a reminder of the importance of Black spirituality to gaining freedom.

In the last stanza, Johnson departs from the rhyme scheme by placing an exhortation to remain “[t]rue to our God” (Line 32) right in the middle of a pledge to uphold the political ideals of the United States. To the last, Johnson represents faith in God and faith in the idealized notion of the United States as central to Black Americans’ pursuit of liberty.

Black Community and the Freedom Struggle

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is by no means an endorsement of Black Nationalism, the political philosophy that Black Americans can best serve their quest for freedom by carving out a separate political and cultural space for themselves. Still, this poem/song is colloquially known as the Black national anthem, a title that is sometimes capitalized and placed in quotation marks due to importance of this song to the idea of Black nationhood. The nationhood Johnson represents in the poem is an idealized, strategic one built around a common cause: Freedom.

Song—shared Black joy and Black creativity—creates a space in which Black Americans can imagine what a free future looks like. Being in community with each other is powerfully good, which Johnson shows with his diction in the first stanza. The song that Black Americans sing with each other is one of “rejoicing” (Line 4), one that “resound[s]” (Line 6), and one that is “loud” (Line 6). The song takes up space in the world so long as it is a communal creation, a point Johnson makes with many first-person plurals—“our” (Lines 4 and 9) and “us” (Lines 7, 8, and 10).

Black Americans have many forms of community in the poem. There is communion among people who share a common past of oppression and struggle against oppression. There is also the communion that Black Americans build within the Black church, which Johnson describes as “the places, our God, where we meet [God]” (Line 28). The speaker prays that Black Americans won’t be distracted by “the wine of the world” (Line 29), with the “wine” representing distraction from the freedom struggle.