Playing the song is a new tradition on the school's campus; it only became possible in recent years after the bell received upgrades to its system. However, the song, officially titled Lift Every Voice and Sing, has possessed the hearts of black people around the globe for over a century, speaking to the enduring faith and resilience of black Americans against racial oppression in the United States.
Lift Every Voice and Sing is a hopeful song, but the wounds of American chattel slavery were still fresh when it was written
When he wrote it in 1900, the scholar and poet James Weldon Johnson did not set out to create a cultural phenomenon. That year, a group of men in Jacksonville, Florida wanted to honour former US President Abraham Lincoln with a birthday celebration. Johnson's contribution was a poem he asked his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, to write the accompanying score. When it was complete, James taught the song's lyrics to a choir of 500 black children, all students at the segregated school he was the principal of at the time. On the day of the event, the brothers brought printed copies of the words to share with the community so others could sing along. "The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish," wrote James in an excerpt from a 1935 collection of poems.
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