by Imani Perry
For this anniversary, in 1939, ASCAP held a weeklong series of concerts, with each night devoted to a different aspect of American music. One of these was dedicated to African American musical achievement. Regardless of how much black people continued to be politically and economically excluded from the full benefits of American citizenship, their artistic achievement, through the vibrancy of renaissance, the entrepreneurship of recording artists and producers, and the many zones of contact across the color line, made it impossible to deny the enormity of black Americans’ impact upon their nation’s music. ASCAP’s program paid tribute to this legacy. Rosamond, W. C. Handy, and Harry T. Burleigh planned the program for the night. They assembled a seventy-five-piece symphony orchestra and a chorus of 350 singers. William Grant Still (Savage’s sole black colleague at the World’s Fair) conducted his Afro-American Symphony. Spirituals, gospel, blues, ragtime, and jazz were also featured. The program opened when conductor Joe Jordan “lifted his baton and called forth from these forces a thunderous rendition of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”77 There was no more appropriate choice to initiate a celebration of the contribution of black people to American music. Theirs was not merely a worthy legacy, it was an inheritance of struggle, and a tradition forged in the midst of it. Whether the audience recognized it or not, like the attendees of the World’s Fair who encountered Savage’s larger-than-life sculpture, this audience heard the sounds and resonances of a nation within a nation, a people who could truly be described as one out of many.
Chapter Three. School Bell Song
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” in the Lives of Children in the Segregated South
. . . they sing 11 a.m. convocation
“Lift Every Voice and Sing”
1100 strong at the black school—
tears in everybody’s eyes
I mean everybody!
—MICHAEL HARPER, “Prologue of an Arkansas Traveler”
I am always thrilled deeply when I hear it sung by Negro children.
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
Children, James Weldon Johnson stated, were the ones who first carried “Lift Every Voice and Sing” forward. But it was the deliberate cultivation of black children in formal educational and civic spaces that firmly institutionalized the song. That cultivation also shaped the youth of the black South who, in the mid-twentieth century, faced down white supremacy and transformed the nation and world.
In the early twentieth century, African American institutions prioritized the development and care of black youth. There were children’s pages in black newspapers and youth branches of black political organizations. Most important, however, were the herculean efforts black Americans put forth to build schools. Schools would, along with churches and clubs, be integral to the rich and tightly networked associational life of black Americans. Schools were more than academic institutions. They were also places for the community to gather, for organizations to meet, for people to plan protests and plot ambitions. Ironically, school segregation greatly facilitated the frontal assault on a segregated society in the mid-twentieth century. In the early years of the century, a period of immense academic striving, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became a signature feature of the curricula of black schools. It served multiple purposes: to educate, to inspire, to nurture collective identities, and to bolster a deep sense of worth in blackness. Schools were key institutions for the development of the generations of young people who would lead the civil rights revolution, and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a key part of black schooling. But let us begin close to the beginning.
As in chapter 2, in order to fully grasp the institutional significance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” in this case in black schools, it is necessary to present a picture of what black education was and to what it aspired in the early twentieth century. By 1900, the year “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written, all southern states required racial segregation in public schools.1 At that point, 90 percent of black people in the United States still lived in the South.2 The deliberate process of legal segregation is a lens through which to understand how the color line hardened at the turn of the century. For example, in 1901 North Carolina law stipulated that a child who was descended from any black person “to the third generation inclusive” was not allowed to attend white schools. This rule was amended in 1903 to apply to any child with any African ancestry, “however remote the strain.”3 Despite the fact that black people were the sector of southern society who lobbied most intensively during Reconstruction for the development of public education in the South,4 the establishment of Jim Crow entailed not simply reduced expenditures for black schools but also funded fewer elementary schools for black students than the number provided for their white counterparts, and only minimal access to high school. This discriminatory state practice was upheld by the Supreme Court, in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528 (1899). The court affirmed the Georgia Supreme Court decision to allow Richmond County to close the only high school for black children under the pretense that it was too expensive to maintain, despite the fact that it kept high schools for white youth open. Precisely at the historical period that broadened access to public high school education for the masses of working-class white youth, including European immigrants who often had never before had access to high school, black communities, which fought so diligently for public education, were left out of this growing promise. Schooling was separate, and even more so, unequal.
In response to the particular challenges of educating black children in a pervasively and deeply unequal society, the National Association for Negro Teachers was founded in Nashville in 1904. Soon thereafter its name was changed to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS) to include white teachers who taught black children, although the membership remained overwhelmingly black. J. R. E. Lee, the director of the academic department at Tuskegee, issued the call for the creation of the organization and served as its president for the first five years.
Prior to the development of the NATCS, most southern states already had local Negro teachers associations. Kentucky’s Negro Education Association had been founded in 1877, and Alabama’s in 1882 (by Booker T. Washington). Georgia’s was created in 1878, Virginia’s in 1888, Oklahoma’s in 1893, and Florida’s in 1891.5
These organizations, both local and national, focused their efforts on pursuing educational equality and excellence for black children. James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many other leading black intellectuals and activists held active memberships in the NATCS for many years and often lectured at NATCS events. James Weldon Johnson, for example, was elected president of the Florida Negro State Teachers Association in 1901.6 The organizations collectively advocated for changes to the law and other funding sources that would allow for equalization of expenditures and resources. They also worked diligently to learn and share research on the best pedagogical and socialization practices for educators, school leaders, and parents to apply in the development of youth.
In an address delivered to the Alabama association in 1912, G. W. Trenholm, the president of Alabama State Teacher’s College, argued that the association must work to collect and compile data on the state of schools for black children, build more and better schools, supplement the public school fund, lengthen the school term, establish more high school departments in grammar schools, and enrich the courses of study. He also encouraged teachers to stay in the school long enough to “do some real good as a teacher. . . . We must strive to win our boys and girls from ignorance as we are striving to win them from hell. We must build school houses for them as well as churches. We must support the teachers as well as the ministers, coworkers together in the same field. It is our divinely imposed duty to do both.”7 If, according to Trenholm, schools were as important as the church, in many communities they became comparably central to black public life and purpose.
Despite the well-known conflict between Washington and DuBois over i
ndustrial versus classical education for black children, they and the multitudes of other educators had a common investment in expanding educational access for black children. The existence of schools with adequate facilities couldn’t be depended upon, notwithstanding how hard black people had struggled for public education in the South. As Theresa Perry observes, the conditions under which black students learned and teachers worked in the early twentieth century were dire: “The black schools were uniformly inferior, many of the rural school buildings being small, box-like structures with leaky roofs, broken windowpanes, few, more often no washing facilities, unplastered or unpainted walls, and cracked floors through which insects and rodents could enter at will.”8
Nevertheless, the educators diligently pursued their self-proclaimed duty to provide excellent education for black children. But given the plantation economy, the resources at the disposal of the black community to build schools were limited. Philanthropy provided one solution. The John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen was established in 1882.9 It substantially funded, among other institutions, Tuskegee University, Hampton University, Fisk University, Spelman College, and Claflin University. While their financial support was critical, the ideological constraints of Slater funds frustrated black people. Slater funds were supposed to be reserved for industrial education, to create good workers rather than independent thinkers. As in most instances, this pressure was circumvented by black educators, who always had more expansive imaginations for black children than their donors.
In 1895, Clinton Calloway, a native of Cleveland, Tennessee, joined the faculty of the Extension Department at Tuskegee. The Extension Department largely trained older rural students in rudimentary literacy and math skills as well as vocational education. Calloway noticed in his work that Alabama’s black belt, in general, was in dire need of better elementary and high schools. He approached Booker T. Washington and suggested seeking funding for school development from Anna T. Jeanes and Julius Rosenwald. They were wealthy white Americans who had relatively liberal leanings on racial issues. Rosenwald ultimately agreed to invest in the development of schools for black children, first in Alabama in 1913 and 1914, under the condition that local people match the funds donated. Extension school students were key to this project. They contributed all they had—labor, wood, and time—to build schools for the black youth of rural Alabama.10 The Rosenwald school program spread throughout the South in the 1920s. Local communities and the Rosenwald Fund together built almost 5,000 schools and 217 teachers homes in fifteen states from Maryland to Texas. Black communities in the agricultural South, still largely dependent on sharecropping, raised more than $4.7 million in this process.11 Southern black schoolhouses transformed from dilapidated, one-room buildings to modest, well-made frame structures.
As historian James Anderson revealed in his groundbreaking work The Education of Blacks in the South, black Americans were engaged in a practice of double taxation as they built schools. DuBois described this process in 1911: “The Negroes are helping to pay for the education of the white children while the states are depriving the Negro children of their just share of school facilities.” Black communities then taxed themselves again, either through fundraising or doing work in-kind to build Rosenwald schools or to support privately held schools. Dubois called these “heroic efforts to remedy these evils thru a wide-spread system of private self-supported schools and philanthropy . . . furnishing a helpful but incomplete system of industrial, normal and collegiate training for children of the black race.”12
It is important to note that these efforts to build schools preceded Rosenwald’s initiative. In 1911 the Negro Baptists of Texas reported more than $17,000 raised for their schools, and the secretary of education for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church reported that black people had raised $32,600 for their schools.13 Because the aspirations for schools preceded Rosenwald’s input it is unsurprising that they also exceeded philanthropists’ expectations of what the schools would be. As with the Slater Fund, the Rosenwald Fund was intended to support industrial education. But the efforts it helped finance became much more than that under the leadership of black educators.
The contributions of the Rosenwald Fund, combined with the labor and contributions of black communities, greatly increased the number of schools available to black children, though they failed to match the accessibility of public education that was available to white children. The buildings that were built, however, were designed with an understanding that black schools often served as community centers. Samuel L. Smith, formerly Tennessee’s “Negro school agent,” became the director of the Rosenwald Fund’s Southern Office in Nashville in 1920. Following the lead set by architecture professors at Tuskegee, who had designed the first Rosenwald schools, Smith determined that “the best modern school is one which is designed to serve the entire community for twelve months in the year. . . . Whenever possible a good auditorium, large enough to seat the entire community, should be erected in connection with every community school. If there are not sufficient funds for an auditorium, two adjoining classrooms with movable partitions may be made to serve this purpose.”14 Furthermore, he recommended that buildings be built on at least a two-acre site and located near a corner of the property. That positioning would leave room for outhouses, a teacher’s home, a play area, and some landscaping.
Other philanthropic supporters aided the committed labor of black community members seeking to build schools. William J. Edwards, founder of the Snow Hill Institute in Wilcox County, Alabama, and an alumnus of Tuskegee Institute, spoke at a meeting in Philadelphia at the behest of Booker T. Washington in the fall of 1902. While there, one of the Tuskegee trustees gave Edwards a letter of introduction to Anna Jeanes, a wealthy Quaker he thought might consider donating to the Snow Hill Institute. Edwards “described the condition of the public schools in the rural district. She gave keen interest to this part of the story.”15 Soon thereafter, Jeanes began giving Edwards money annually to support his school, in increments of $200 to $600. In 1906, when Booker T. Washington came to visit, she donated $11,000 to him and another $11,000 to Hollis Burke Frissell, president of Hampton Institute, Washington’s alma mater. The following year, Jeanes established the Negro Rural School Fund and endowed it with a million dollars. The first Jeanes teacher was Virginia Estelle Randolph of Henrico County, Virginia.16 She would serve the county for fifty-nine years as an educator, dramatically representing the commitment and significance of Jeanes teachers. By 1910 there were 129 Jeanes teachers working in 130 counties across thirteen southern states. By 1931 that number had nearly tripled.17
Jeanes teachers served rural communities. Oftentimes, these were places where black inhabitants lived at a subsistence level. Families were subject to demands of seasonal labor, which interrupted schooling for children born to sharecropping families. And Jim Crow was harshest. Jeanes teachers frequently taught all grades and ages in a single room, warmed by a single potbellied stove at the front of the room.18 The age range was so great, in part, because even those who had missed most of their schooling due to work often tried to continue going to school past the age of eighteen, even if they were only skilled at a first- or second-grade level. In addition to academics, Jeanes teachers were often health and financial educators who worked on behalf of the entire community, their mantra being “doing the next needed thing.”19 They maintained a communication network across relative remote locations by means of the National Jeanes Journal. There, the educators reported on curricula, events, successes, and challenges in their local schools.20 In Copiah County, Mississippi, Jeanes teachers held an annual “Achievement Day” that included exhibits from each school, literary contests, music programs, and a keynote address, as well as a basketball game, door prizes, and awards for academic achievement. The community also opened a Saturday school in an effort to make up for time the children lost working in the fields. Parents fundraised with cakewalk competitions, singing programs, and selling dinners. Out of
the proceeds they paid the teachers to work on weekends.21
At the other end of the spectrum for black schools were superb institutions that provided a liberal elementary education, and others that offered a complete classical high school curriculum that could rival New England preparatory schools. They did so in well-resourced buildings with educators who had attended northern universities. Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., was the most frequently cited example of a superior segregated school par excellence and the first black public high school in the nation.
Dunbar was originally named the M Street School, before being renamed in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a gesture consistent with the early twentieth-century commonplace of naming black schools after accomplished and renowned black people. Dunbar became a feeder to elite northern colleges including Oberlin, Bates, Brown, Colby, Bowdoin, Amherst, and Harvard. Anna Julia Cooper, the fourth black American woman to receive a PhD (from the Sorbonne) and regarded by many as one of the first black women public intellectuals for her 1892 book A Voice from the South, began as a math and science teacher at Dunbar in 1887 and became its principal in 1902. Dunbar educated many of the most accomplished members of the black leadership class during segregation, including the celebrated poet Sterling Brown; leading educator and activist Nannie Helen Burroughs; attorney William H. Hastie; the first African American woman to earn a PhD, Sadie Mossell; and the dean of Howard Law School and architect of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation strategy, Charles Hamilton Houston, as well as a host of others. Its faculty at various points included Kelly Miller, Carter G. Woodson, and Mary Church Terrell. Research and curriculum development were key to Dunbar’s success. For example, its History Teacher’s Club in 1924 compiled a bibliography of black history. It had three working committees for this project: one focused on ancient history, one on medieval and modern history, and one on American history. At the end of the academic year, each committee reported to the group on its findings, thus expanding knowledge to the entire faculty and larger community.22
