by Imani Perry
The dominant pop culture story we tell and hear of the civil rights movement tends to follow the standard narrative applied by postwar liberalism. This is to our great detriment. It emphasizes men over women, lawyers over teachers, the NAACP over all other organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) over SNCC, the robust antifascism of the war over the chilling anticommunism of the postwar period, and so on and so forth. In the process of disciplining our recollection of history, the complex political configurations involved in waging the civil rights struggle are often erased. But contemplating the role of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in the 1940s and 1950s enables us to undertake an abbreviated but nonetheless quite rich exploration of the black political landscape. Unions, nationalisms, communism, socialism, as well as liberalism infused the movement for decades before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. And the appearance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” here and there throughout these struggles at once shows how deeply rooted the anthem was in black life, and also how it could provide an inspiration or rallying cry for people of divergent perspectives.
In his 1956 recording of “The House I Live In,” from the album Sonny Boy, the renowned saxophonist Sonny Rollins concludes the song with a brief quotation of the first line of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This was a few months before Rollins recorded his landmark social movement album, Freedom Suite. Rollins’s quotation holds particular significance because “The House I Live In” had been composed by Earl Robinson, who, at the time of the Rollins recording, had been blacklisted as a communist. The lyrics to “The House I Live In” were written by another prominent white leftist, Abel Meeropol, the man who adopted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s children after their execution for being convicted of being communist spies. Meeropol was also author of the haunting classic about lynching, most famously recorded by Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit.”
Rollins said he was moved to record “The House I Live In” because “Earl Robinson had written ‘Ballad for Americans’ for Paul Robeson, which meant a lot to me when I was growing up,” and he wanted to put in his own political commentary by quoting the Negro National Anthem. Placing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” within “The House I Live In” suggested a house within a house, the contained unfree amid the “land of the free” out of which the black American freedom struggle emerged. But it also paid homage to the interwoven nature of the radical left tradition, the black formalist and associationalist one, and the black creative imagination as twisting, turning, and sometimes overlapping threads in the black freedom struggle. But another event, one that broke the dam and led America into its social revolution, was surely on Rollins’s mind when he teased his listeners with a strain of the Negro National Anthem: the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Chapter Five. Shall We Overcome?
Music and the Movement
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,
Turn me around, turn me around.
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.
I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’,
Marchin’ down to freedom land.
—Freedom song
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was precipitated by the act of Rosa Parks, a longtime activist and well-respected member of the black Montgomery community. Parks refused to yield her seat on a city bus to a white man. She was arrested and fined. The networked associations of Montgomery, long committed to organizing against segregation, responded with a call to boycott the segregation of the city’s public buses.
The complex orchestration and fortitude that were necessary for black Montgomery to wage a boycott lasting over a year were extraordinary. Montgomery residents inspired protests and organizing that would follow, throughout the South. Dorothy Posey Jones, the organist of First Baptist Church on Ripley Street in Montgomery, remembered how important it was for the Montgomery community to sustain the spirit and resilience of the boycott through their long campaign. She recalled the particular importance of singing “Lift Every Voice” at the mass meetings that were held during the boycott (which began on December 5, 1955, and ended December 20, 1956). Regular First Baptist meetings served to renew the community’s sense of purpose and faith. “They sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ at a regular tempo, and the third (stanza) was the prayer section, so we slowed it down. . . . Every seat was filled, the balcony, every place was filled.”1 The organ reverberated throughout the church and microphones piped the sound into the overflow basement room.
The unisonance, the fellow feeling, the hope for the realization of that imagined community as well as the actual community buoyed the boycotters. And they prevailed. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle (352 U.S. 903), the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system. It was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that Martin Luther King Jr. first shone as a movement leader. He was anointed by an older generation of Montgomery activists that included trade unionists and people who had belonged to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, like E. D. Nixon; club women and teachers, like Joanne Robinson (a professor at Alabama State University); and NAACP activists, like Rosa Parks; along with many other local residents.
Ten days after the boycott ended victoriously, King delivered an address at an Emancipation Day program in Atlanta. It was, however, less a commemoration than a rally. Times were changing and there was reason for excitement. King’s speech was an extended riff on “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” resounding with the repeated “Let freedom ring.” That first day of 1957, in the intimate black Atlanta world, he also anticipated his most famous March on Washington speech, which would be delivered on a world stage in 1963.
My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountain side,
Let freedom ring.
At this point in King’s speech, however, the pianist began to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in the background. It continued until the end of his speech:
As I heard a great orator say some time ago, that must become literally true. Freedom must ring from every mountain side. Yes, go out determined this afternoon, that it will ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let it ring from the prodigious hill tops of New Hampshire. Let it ring from the mighty Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let it ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that. From every mountain side, (Yeah) let freedom ring. Yes, let it ring from every mountain and hill of Alabama. Let it ring from every mole hill in Mississippi. Let it ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let it ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. From every mountain side, let freedom ring.
“Lift Every Voice” was the backdrop to an early version of the sermon that would come to define the movement. But eventually it would cease to be the sound of the movement.
In the late 1950s, however, the variety of ways we see “Lift Every Voice and Sing” appear in black political life suggests both the continued influence of the song, and how the cultural practices associated with the Deep South, shaped civil rights movement organizing. In 1957, during the months leading up to the struggle to integrate Little Rock’s Central High, the city’s Phyllis Wheatley YWCA held a book review program. It opened with a singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Then the attendees heard Mildred Henderson review a book written by Charlie May Simon, All Men Are Brothers, a pictorial biography of Albert Schweitzer. The author, a white Arkansan woman, was present and spoke as well. The book included a substantial discussion of Schweitzer’s work as a medical missionary in Africa. The author took this work to be Schweitzer’s response to Jesus’s call to become “fishers of men.” However, in the process of proselytizing, Schweitzer developed a strong criticism of European colonialism of Africa. Although he did not fully commit himself to the cause of African liberation, this black organization’s celebration of Schweitzer in 1957 was symbolic of the slowly shifting America
n sensibility regarding racial justice that had been fostered by racial liberalism, and the persistent though muted tie to the African continent and diaspora that African Americans felt and their allies sometimes recognized. Schweitzer intoned a responsibility for whites to undo the harm done to indigenous and enslaved people the world over, writing, “I will not enumerate all the crimes that have been committed under the pretext of justice. People robbed native inhabitants of their land, made slaves of them, let loose the scum of mankind upon them. Think of the atrocities that were perpetrated upon people made subservient to us, how systematically we have ruined them with our alcoholic ‘gifts,’ and everything else we have done. . . . We decimate them, and then, by the stroke of a pen, we take their land so they have nothing left at all.”2 That charge resonated with those who had also been subject to domination on these shores.
Although Pan-Africanism waned during the 1950s and early 1960s, largely because of McCarthyism and the deals struck between the U.S. State Department and the civil rights establishment, threads of connection remained, albeit greatly muted in comparison to the earlier part of the twentieth century. And “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a consistent motif in moments of pan-African solidarity. The Chicago Defender, for example, reported frequently on Ghanaian independence, which was won in 1957. Martin Luther King Jr., along with many other organizers, looked to Ghanaian independence as a source of inspiration in their domestic movement. And Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, had deeply felt decades of connection with black American intellectuals and activists. In a 1957 article for the Chicago Defender, George F. McCray, a black American labor organizer who worked in Africa, reported, “Several weeks ago Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party held a gigantic rally at the Sports Stadium. They sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ better than do American Negroes then poured a libation calling upon our ancestors.”3 The Defender, at that point black America’s most popular national newspaper, also reported that at the All African People’s Conference of 1959, held in Ghana, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was sung by Robert A. Lee, an African American physician and expatriate to Ghana. Several of the conference speakers paid tribute to African America for the seeds of Pan-Africanism, and for educating African leaders like Nkrumah. Expatriate reporter McCray was there again as well. He’d traveled for the occasion to Ghana from East Africa, where he was heading a trade union leadership school. And while no Americans were official delegates to that All African People’s Conference, a number of black Americans were present, including scholar St. Clair Drake, educator Horace Mann Bond, and Charles Diggs, a black member of Congress from Michigan. Greetings were announced from A. Philip Randolph and the NAACP, as well as other black civil rights organizations.4
“Lift Every Voice” was presented in some other quarters as a symbol of black Americans’ efforts to push against the door, then slightly ajar, to full citizenship. In 1957, the first radio variety program in the Midwest featuring black talent was broadcast from Youngstown, Ohio, every Sunday afternoon from 2:00 to 2:30 and hosted by LaFrances Chapman Johnson. The program was titled Lift Every Voice5 and used the song as its theme music, rendered by the A. C. Bilbrew Choir of Los Angeles. “Each Sunday a guest speaker presented by Mrs. Johnson discusses some project or subject of general interest to the community.” Additionally, talent shows, music, and comedians were featured on the program. In 1957 in Chicago another series of radio broadcasts titled Lift Every Voice featured church choirs and their pastors from the South and West Sides of Chicago on Saturdays from noon to 12:30.6
Black radio programs in the 1950s tended to focus on news and public affairs relevant to black people, as well as on church and social events, and, of course, music. They became forums for charismatic deejays to become local celebrities. These deejays shared their thoughts and entertained their listeners. But even shows without such personalities were successful. Listen Chicago, the first news discussion program aimed at African Americans, debuted in 1946 and ran until 1952. A 1948 newspaper discussion of this program described it as follows:
To this forum are brought leaders of progressive thought, men and women who have something to say to Chicago. National Credit takes only a sponsor identifying line at the opening and close of the presentation. The entire program is devoted to discussion of subjects like “Democracy and Education,” “Civil Rights—and Wrongs,” and “Erasing the Color Line.”
Most commercial broadcasters in the Windy City were certain that the program was doomed to failure. It was a “heavy” show. It was on the air at the wrong time of day. It displays very little conventional showmanship.
They were wrong. The program is catching on. The National Credit Clothing Company can trace definite business to its sponsorship. The station is receiving real fan mail on the program. Once again it is being proved that community service can be commercial.7
Even if the audience for black radio was primarily black, the growing presence of black subject matter on the airwaves indicated that black people were moving further into the mass media sphere on their own terms and not simply as the butt of jokes. And the mainstream radio presentations of black culture and history were also a sign of growing liberalism around the idea of race, and a slow warming to the idea that black Americans were fully American; simply one type of American among other Americans, as though they were just another ethnic group. Yet these hints of liberalism coexisted with entrenched segregation and economic inequality in the North, and a passionate commitment to legal racial stratification as well in the South.
For liberals in the political establishment, the limits of racial justice continued to be rigorously guarded. Paul Robeson’s passport still had not been returned when he performed in Oakland, California, in August 1958. He began his concert with “Lift Every Voice” and two and a half hours later ended with a selection from Othello. In between he sang Franz Schubert’s “Sleep My Little One” as well as Chinese, Yiddish, and Russian folksongs.8 In a few months his passport would be restored, as the McCarthy era ended. It was as though the U.S. government no longer felt threatened by a radical Left that had been so diminished. But even the more modest political vision entailed by what came to be known as civil rights would provide a bold challenge to America, one that transformed the nation and owed a debt to Robeson and his comrades.
Ralph Bunche, a Nobel Prize–winning negotiator, diplomat, and political scientist who was one of the black leaders most connected to the White House and political power in the 1950s, spoke in Birmingham at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1959. He came at the invitation of the Periclean Club. One of many active black associations in Birmingham, the Periclean Club regularly brought distinguished leaders to the city to give lectures on their areas of expertise. The club was also one of many associations in Birmingham that held meetings at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Others included the Semper Fidelis Club, the Imperial Club, and the Alabama State Teachers Association.9 Bunche had once been a socialist but by the late 1940s was unquestionably a liberal Democrat. In 1959, he spoke to the Pericleans about racial incidents from his youth and urged his listeners to never run away from a fight for principles. Although Bunche was awarded a key to the city by the mayor of Birmingham, he was denied a hotel room in the city. The “Magic City” would not respect even the most distinguished and assimilated black person.
The Periclean Club program, as these things often did, implicitly and explicitly rejected the ideology of white supremacy with its black formalism. It began with an organ prelude by Mrs. Bonna MacPerine Samuel. Then the audience sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Mrs. A. G. Gaston, the wife of the wealthiest African American man in Birmingham and a cofounder of Mary McLeod Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women, introduced Bunche. After he delivered his address, the Dunbar Chorus, named after Paul Laurence Dunbar, sang the Negro spiritual “Let My People Go.” The final song was “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” followed by a benediction. The three songs on the program signaled the participants’ common l
ot as Americans, as descendants of the people who sang the sorrow songs in slavery, and as members of black social, civic, and political organizations. Regular folks in the room stood alongside wealth and distinction. Without exception, they all lived on the disfavored side of the color line.10
The freedom movement through the 1950s was planned largely by local institutions like this. People used civic associations, schools, and churches, as well as unions and political organizations—left, liberal, and moderate—as the structures through which they planned protests, boycotts, and court cases. Though perhaps not as politically varied as the 1930s, the 1950s movement was well-organized and depended on the deep structure of networked black life for its execution. Just as the 1954 Brown v. Board school desegregation decision rested upon the work not only of the NAACP but also of the teachers and local community organizations that supported the plaintiffs, the organizing that multiplied after Brown included many different types of organizations.
