Why We Have (And Need) A Black National Anthem
And why racists are mad.
The usual gang of racists are furious that singer Andra Day performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during the Super Bowl pregame show. Their stated issue with the song is that it’s known as the “Black national anthem,” and that offends them because we already have a perfectly good national anthem written by a white slave owner.
“The so-called Black National Anthem does not belong at the Super Bowl. We already have a National Anthem and it includes EVERYONE,” declared Black Santa Claus debunker Megyn Kelly.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz claims he didn’t watch the Super Bowl at all because of the race-mixing national anthems. He posted this conversation between himself and his wife, Ginger, which I’m sure actually happened.
Wife: Today is the Super Bowl!
Me: We aren’t watching.
Wife: Why?
Me: They’re desecrating America’s National Anthem by playing something called the “Black National Anthem.”
Wife: Does that mean Cardi is performing?
Scumbag Rudy Giuliani, who declared bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay $148 million to the two Black women he defamed, ranted about “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on his radio show. As you might expect, almost everything he said, including the punctuation, was racist.
“I don’t even know how to justify that. Why not play the Mexican national anthem, or the Italian national anthem, or the French national anthem? There are a lot of groups, like Tikvah, the Israeli national anthem. This country is made up of people that come from places that have other national anthems, and it’s pretty damn insulting. The people that are being persecuted the most right now in the country are the Jews, not the Blacks. Where’s the sympathy for the Jewish people?”
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written in 1899 by civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson. Both Black men were born in America so Giuliani only demonstrates his ignorance and bigotry when he compares the Black national anthem to the Mexican, Italian, French, or Israeli national anthems.
The hymn is a song specifically about the Black experience in America, which makes it a uniquely American composition.
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning 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.
Johnson had planned to write a poem commemorating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday but eventually shifted his theme to the struggles of Black people following Reconstruction. Johnson was born in Florida in 1871 so had personally witnessed how white Southern conservatives, with their Northern accomplices, rolled back Black people’s hard-won freedoms. Nonetheless, the hymn is joyous and hopeful yet determined. Jim Crow might re-shackle Black people but it couldn’t break their spirits.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
The hymn was first performed in 1900 and the Black community quickly embraced it.
“Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds,” Johnson would later write. “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 … The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”
The NAACP designated “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as the Black national anthem in 1919, a decade before Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” was named the national anthem. Kelly might say that “The Star-Spangled Banner” includes everyone, but like her conclusions about Jesus’s racial heritage, she’s quite wrong. Black people were enslaved when Key wrote his song, and we’re not judging him by today’s standards when we call him out as a slave owner. Abolitionists at the time remarked on Key’s hypocrisy. As Belize observed in Angels in America, “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.”
Key did not consider Black people among the “freemen” mentioned in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As district attorney for the District of Columbia, Key prosecuted abolitionist Reuben Crandall on charges of “seditious libel and inciting slaves and free Blacks to revolt.” The “libel” was publishing materials that described slavery as cruel and sinful. Today, Key’s moral descendants attempt to rewrite Black history in America’s schoolrooms.
A jury would acquit Crandall, but Key had persuaded a judge to impose so high a bail that Crandall remained in jail for almost eight months. He contracted tuberculosis while imprisoned and died shortly after his release at the age of 32.
Key knew nothing about true freedom or democracy. His words were unworthy of Whitney Houston.
After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the NFL, which profits tremendously off Black labor, committed to playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before season openers. Alicia Keys performed the hymn at the 2021 Super Bowl pregame. Mary Mary and Sheryl Lee Ralph followed in 2022 and 2023.
Kelly, Gaetz, Giuliani and many others in the same mold of Francis Scott Key will protest loudly but they can’t drown out these words.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
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Oh my goodness reading the caterwauling of those shitty people, at the very least Truth-Sandwiched by your beautiful words, made me cry a little bit. Holy shit the mask really slips off with these people
You can read the contempt just oozing from Roodles the Clown, much like his hair dye, when he talks about "the Blacks," just like President Klan Robe.
Not even surprised about McCloskey. And no wonder Congressman Scumbag has such wide support among his shitty, shitty constituents.
I want all these braying, unreconstructed racists to cry this November. Just like so many people in this country have done, they speak of Black people even as a separate species.
Also as a P.S. to the execrable McCloskey - we PAY TAXES and our labor built this country shitty people like you benefit from. And we built it for free. Piece of shit colonizer.
The loss of free labor. IMHO this is what's driving the frantic push of both racism and misogyny. Black people unionizing and learning their worth. This must stop.
And I want to apologize for including women's rights here too but it's only to demonstrate the intersectionality of what's happening. Women also were often (not sometimes) trapped in abusive marriages where they were expected to cook, clean and raise children for free. That's why there's all the craziness about Taylor Swift. Oh and BS articles saying that married people are happier.
I've often said that the only time some white people come into "contact" with Black people is through sports. I use the term contact loosely. It's been one of the few venues for Black people to raise awareness about their plight in America.
What I'm saying is - it's about keeping free or cheap labor.