by Imani Perry
Jacksonville, in particular, was an appealing migration destination for many African Americans. Homesteading in Florida allowed black people to acquire property more easily than in many other parts of the South.3 And Jacksonville’s burgeoning tourist industry offered numerous employment opportunities. James landed a position at the St. James Hotel, a luxury resort that catered to wealthy white Americans. This job was both more lucrative and safer than many. Tourism often seemed to mediate the worst forms of racist violence. Too much violence was bad for business, particularly from northerners seeking relaxing vacations.
But perhaps the most important attraction Jacksonville held for the Johnson family was that Florida, unlike all other southern states, had a public school system before the Civil War. In 1839 the Florida legislature first established a public school system, whereas elsewhere in the South public education systems were introduced in the 1860s and 1870s, only as a result of African Americans’ and Radical Republican legislators’ impassioned efforts. Florida was different. With the Reconstruction-era promises of equality and citizenship, it was clear that the Florida public school system would have to include the newly emancipated black population. In 1868, black residents of Jacksonville established the Education Society, with the goal of building a school. With the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, by the end of the year they had established the first public school for black children in the state, the Edwin McMasters Stanton School, named for Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war. Although the faculty was initially comprised of northern white women, Helen Louise Dillet Johnson became the first black public school teacher in the city, and her two exceptional sons’ first teacher as well.4
By the time these teacher’s sons learned to read, Reconstruction, with its promises of political and legal equality for black citizens, faced a horrific backlash. Violence was the handmaiden of the “redemption” of white supremacy, and black southerners were routinely terrorized. In Florida, one of the last states to remain under Republican control, Reconstruction ended formally in 1876. Seven years later, in 1883, the Supreme Court hammered the final nail in Reconstruction’s coffin with the “Civil Rights Cases” that declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.5 The ironically titled cases granted southern businesses the license to systematically exclude black people from train cars, eating establishments, hotels, clothing stores, and virtually all commercial life. And they did. This was the first large step toward a de jure Jim Crow society. Attack on the vote soon followed, as all-white primaries established a “democratic” process that effectively excluded black citizens from participation in government “by the people, for the people.” A new brutality came along with these exclusions. Between 1882 and 1902 over 2,000 black people were lynched.6 Southern state legislatures all rewrote their constitutions to explicitly and boldly assert their commitment to white supremacy. And in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson,7 the Supreme Court declared that Louisiana could mandate legal segregation, which became the foundation upon which Jim Crow white supremacy rested and grew.
While James, in recollection, considered Jacksonville to be kinder and more equitable for African Americans than the rest of the South, it was unquestionably subject to the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow order. However, he and his brother were middle class and relatively privileged, although certainly not spoiled, according to James’s memories. In their youth, they achieved a great deal in the tradition of black strivers across the globe who, with every little bit of opportunity, worked diligently to transcend the color line that nevertheless circumscribed their lives. Both brothers attended the Stanton School for Negroes through eighth grade and, there being no public high school for black students in Jacksonville, both departed in order to further their educations. James enrolled at Atlanta University for high school and college, and Rosamond at the New England Conservatory, after which he studied music in London.
After his graduation from Atlanta University, James returned home and took a position as a teacher at the Stanton School; he also studied law in preparation for the Florida bar examination. In 1897, James sat for the two-hour oral examination before three attorneys and a judge.8 He later recalled that one of the examiners, disgusted by the prospect of a black attorney, left the room. Despite this affront, James passed and became the first African American admitted to the bar in Florida since Reconstruction.
James soon thereafter was made principal of the Stanton School. At the time, Rosamond was an educator as well. He served as a music teacher at the neighboring Florida Baptist Academy, one of a number of black boarding schools scattered throughout the South. It was while they taught at these institutions that they penned “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” They’d go on to many other musical collaborations, but this was to be their most famous and enduring coauthored work.
In 1900, when they wrote the song, Jacksonville was the largest city in Florida, with a population of 28,429. The black population of 16,236 comprised over half of the city.9 It was a robust community but one that lived under the thumb of a racially unjust system. This period in history was described by the historian Rayford Logan (who would become both a friend and protégé of James) as the “nadir” of American race relations in his 1954 book The Betrayal of the Negro: Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson.10
The last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century marked the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society. The continued decline in the recognition of his political and legal rights cannot be attributed entirely to the emergence of new issues that shunted the Southern question further into the background. To be sure the tariff, the free and unlimited coinage of silver, federal regulation of interstate commerce and of corporations, the “closing of the frontier” reform of the civil service and of municipal governments—these and other domestic questions, diverted attention from the treatment of the Negro. . . . The nadir was reached however not by lack of attention. On the contrary, the plight of the Negro worsened precisely because of the efforts made to improve it. The Republicans, once more in the White House and with a majority in both houses for the first time since 1875, introduced two major pieces of legislation to protect the right to vote and to provide expanded educational facilities. The resurgent South, supported by old allies in the North and by new allies in the West, not only defeated both measures but launched a counter attack that further curtailed the already diminishing rights of Negroes. The questions of the tariff and of free silver served less to divert attention from the deterioration of the Negro’s status, especially in the South, than to buttress the deliberate relegation of Negroes to the role of an inferior class. At the turn of the century it seemed, indeed, that they might become a caste.11
Rayford Logan chose his symbolism effectively. A nadir is the lowest point in an orbit. It is the location directly below the gaze. The heavenward hopeful eyes of black Americans had shifted down as America broke the promise of Reconstruction, a betrayal that reached sickening depths under Jim Crow. The Johnson brothers and their contemporaries experienced this transition from the hope of Reconstruction to the devastation of the nadir as they came of age. They were called to both mourn dashed dreams and dream anew in their adulthoods as a pigmentocracy took hold where citizenship had been promised.
In response to the rise of Jim Crow, black Americans turned inward and organized. One of the principal signs of this organization was the rise of the black press. In the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century more than 1,200 black newspapers were founded, and at the dawn of the twentieth they served a vital function in black life and letters.12 James himself had founded a newspaper in Jacksonville, the Daily American, in 1895. It covered black American life in the region. Due to financial difficulties, however, it lasted only eight months. But the Johnson brothers were part of the collective black aspirations of this period in other ways too, as educators and musicians. Black schools, from elementary to college, were steadily opening and growing across the country. Black musicians were pursuing f
ormal training, publishing their compositions, and applying notation to traditional folk tunes. Additionally, black musicians were creating new musical forms and expanding the scope of traditional ones. Black writers were publishing novels, essays, short stories, and plays, and activists described their output as an important tool for racial uplift. And black organizations—religious, political, and civic—were on the move, incorporating, meeting, and developing agendas for “the Negro.” Hence, the nadir can be remembered as a time not simply of exclusion and racist violence but also of blossoming.
These activities fit into what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the distinctly American practice of “associational life,” that is, the forming and joining of associations for nearly every venture, from entertainment and education to religion and commerce.13
Black associationalism was likewise robust, though behind the veil.14 The organizations created by black Americans in the Jim Crow era numbered in the thousands. As Nina Mjagkij writes, “Throughout American history, African Americans have established a multitude of religious, professional, business, political, recreational, educational, secret, social, cultural and mutual aid societies.”15 For black Americans, however, associationalism was often explicitly political, even with respect to organizations that had no explicitly political purpose. For example, members of social clubs, Greek letter organizations, fraternal lodges, and teachers organizations all at various points and in varying branches were involved in civil rights organizing.
Like many of their peers, the Johnson brothers were “race men.” This meant the work they did was not pursued for mere personal achievement or acclaim. Race men and women understood that each accomplishment was meaningful for the aspirations of the race as a whole. Their pursuits were attached to the needs and hopes of black people generally. James and Rosamond were artists and intellectuals who pursued their particular passions, but they also would have long careers in service of black people, as educators, activists, and archivists of black literature, sermons, and music.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was initially imagined by James as a poem to celebrate the February 12 birthday of late president Abraham Lincoln, but on the page it came to be something else. What James created with his lyrics stood in the tradition of a different February-born leader, the abolitionist author Frederick Douglass. Douglass, like most enslaved children, hadn’t had his birth date recorded. However, he’d chosen February 14 as the day on which he would celebrate his birth. Not incidentally this was two days after Lincoln’s. Frederick Douglass’s narratives told the story of his journey from slavery to freedom with drama, passion, breathtaking emotion, and stunning brilliance. James’s poem did something quite similar: he told the story of black life in terms that were epic, wrenching, and thunderous:
A group of young men decided to hold on February 12th a celebration in honor of Lincoln’s birthday. I was put down for an address, which I began preparing, but I wanted to do something else also. My thoughts began buzzing round a central idea of writing a poem about Lincoln but I couldn’t net them. So I gave up the project as beyond me. . . . My central idea, however, took on another form. I talked over with my brother the thought I had in mind and we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises. We planned better still to have it sung by school children, a chorus of 500 voices.16
The children of the Stanton School sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (published under the title “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” but intoned as “every”) at the Lincoln’s birthday celebration. They delivered it with a special dedication to Booker T. Washington: the preeminent (albeit controversial) black leader at the turn of the century and the founder of Tuskegee Institute. It was quite common for black institutions to honor Washington. Washington had greater fundraising capacity and access to powerful people than any other black leader of his era. He could be a rainmaker or a destroyer of opportunity. Washington’s attractiveness to white leaders rested heavily upon the fact that he did not advocate for black political power or the full exercise of their civil rights. Rather, he focused on economic development by means of vocational education that trained black people to be farmers or to work in semiskilled and skilled labor rather than the professions. It was strategically wise for the Johnsons to honor Washington with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” despite the fact that their own journeys had pushed beyond the circumscribed role for black Americans that Washington embraced.
The song proved to be, both then and soon thereafter, much bigger than an ode to any one leader or icon. It was a lament and encomium to the story and struggle of black people. The Johnsons at once wrote black history and wrote black people into the traditions of formal Western music with their noble song.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” would become an important feature of a cultural practice that I refer to as “black formalism.” Black formalism emerged in the late nineteenth-century United States. It is a term I am using here to describe the performance and substance within black associations and institutions. Black formalism includes ritual practices with embedded norms, codes of conduct, and routine, dignified ways of doing and being. It includes greetings, sartorial practices (e.g., wearing one’s Sunday best with a slip underneath and a hat on one’s head, or a fresh handkerchief and a button-down shirt), and ideals of appropriate behavior for certain times and places, as well as oratory, homiletics, traditional songs, and standard ways of structuring events and special occasions. It is, in its symbolic meaning, an articulation and expression of grace and identity that existed in refuge from the violence of white supremacy.
Though black formalism was engaged in by “the folk,” poor and working-class African Americans, it is not what one would term a “folk” practice. Rather it was the formal rituals and habits that exist in virtually all cultures, marking a sense of propriety that depends upon time and place. Stated simply, what one would do on Saturday night at the juke joint was different from the starched and straight-backed expectations of the church on Sunday or the classroom on Monday.
Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham astutely described “the politics of respectability” of the same period as a practice of striving black women’s organizations that used “being respectable” according to middle-class white Christian norms and ideals of virtue.17 I argue that black formalism is distinct from the politics of respectability. Black formalism describes practices that were primarily internal to the black community, rather than those based upon a white gaze or an aspiration for white acceptance. It was engaged in across class lines rather than being rooted in a belief in white and middle-class superiority and pushed from the middle class top down to the poor, as was the politics of respectability. The source material for my account of black formalism is made up of thousands of documents—school and church programs, graduation ceremonies, works of literature, oral histories, material culture and images—that revealed a captivating cultural landscape within black communities from the late nineteenth century on, which included not only a striking vernacular culture of spirituals, blues, and the like but also a similarly compelling formal culture of pageantry, oratory, and ritual.
The late nineteenth century was a remarkable period in black American life, because it allowed black people to fashion civic life like never before. While black religious, musical, and family culture existed within enslavement, the establishment of formal institutions and associational life was largely new in the South. As these institutions and associations were developed, norms of “black formalism” emerged therein. Although the period of Reconstruction, during which black Americans were able to exercise their constitutional rights and participate fully in politics and economics, was rather short, and the brutality of Jim Crow, which entailed not just segregated facilities but extralegal violence, agricultural labor domination, and the rise of the convict lease system, began within twelve years after the end of slavery, black civic and social organizing continued to grow.
Certainly, the formal rituals of the southern gentry and the ov
erwhelmingly American culture of associational life played a role in the development of black formalism. These were deeply American people. But the expression of black formalism in particular was distinct from mainstream culture in both form and political content. An example is found in the concluding ceremony of a black dressmaker’s school organized in New York City in the summer of 1921 by a Madame Katherine of Savannah, Georgia. That July afternoon, “Mrs Edith Turnage, who rendered a piano selection,” was accompanied by Miss Pauline V. Ferguson “in a most thrilling vocal solo.” Mrs. Turnage also “rendered the music for the class song ‘Negro National Anthem’” (by 1921 “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was known as such). The graduation ceremony featured the students’ work, including a salmon satin evening gown by Mrs. Lonis Savor, and both a black-and-white taffeta bathing suit and a dinnergown of peacock blue taffeta and pink crepe de chine, by the aforementioned singer of the anthem, Pauline Ferguson. Additionally, Mrs. Ella La Nair produced a blue broadcloth coat suit and an afternoon dress of sand-color crepe de chine trimmed with brown satin, and Alice L. Ferguson created a “brown chiffon velvet street costume trimmed with brown lace.”18 For these young black women, making beautiful clothing was not simply an adoption of traditional Western feminine conventions. It was a means by which elegance and formal attire symbolized a refusal of the degradations heaped upon black women and their bodies. They were better than the inferior lot the world assigned to them. To be a seamstress was a working-class profession, one that many black women held. Hunching over a sewing machine all day was debilitating and exhausting physical work, often underpaid. But nevertheless it held creative power and the possibility of self-definition, as exemplified by their designs.19 In this instance, and throughout this book, you can see how the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would become a consistent element of the ritual behaviors that were part of black formalism.
