by Imani Perry
Several months later, girls and boys as young as McDowell would be attacked by police dogs, knocked down by fire hoses, and jailed at the fairgrounds in Birmingham. Moments like the one McDowell described prepared them for the transformation to the new mode of organizing. The Lincoln Douglass Banquet concluded with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” But at the fairgrounds the children sang the freedom songs. While “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was integral to the socialization that enabled organizers and activists in Birmingham and elsewhere to confront Jim Crow so courageously, the musical resources they looked to now, for the most part, were songs like “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” In the anticipation of dangerous encounters, short insistent verses worked better. When the police descended, and some marchers would fall, punchy and powerful lines bolstered their courage. The immediacy of danger called forth music that could echo the shouts of field hollers and the wails of spirituals of supplication. Protesters were moving outside of the zones and rituals of black associational life when they began daily and dangerous confrontations with American public space, declaring it no longer “whites only.”
In a 1963 article for the Chicago Defender, columnist Dave Potter declared “We Shall Overcome” to be the “New Negro Anthem.” He described it as “the theme song of America’s militant Negro” that was displacing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: “Until the civil rights movement got into full swing in Montgomery, Alabama, with the famed bus boycott led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the acknowledged Negro National Anthem was ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ written by James Weldon Johnson.”23
That may have been an overstatement or perhaps too early a declaration. On March 28, 1963, over 100 high school students marched to the downtown businesses in Rome, Georgia, to protest segregation. The students held sit-ins and were refused service at G. C. Murphy Co., Keith-Walgreen Drug Store, Redford’s Variety Store, and Enloe Drug Store. Police were called, and about sixty students were arrested and sent to jail for the next several days. Their young age did not spare them punishment. Their families who came to bring them provisions were turned away. At night the guards made the teenagers cold by turning on the air conditioners and opening windows, and during the day they made them roast by keeping the windows closed and the air conditioners off. To keep their spirits up, the youth sang freedom songs like “Go Down, Moses,” with lyrics modified to replace Pharaoh with the local police chief. On Sunday, however, the day before their court hearings, they recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”24 Though not a freedom song, it still had a treasured meaning.
Some people blended freedom songs with “Lift Every Voice,” holding on to tradition and embracing the renewed passion for freedom fighting at once. A letter to the Defender’s editors by Bessie Hughes, just a few weeks prior to the Rome protests, commented on a televised debate between James Baldwin and James Kilpatrick, the editor of the Richmond News Leader. Kilpatrick was an advocate for segregation who argued that black people were biologically inferior to whites. Baldwin responded to him with characteristic poise and brilliance. In her letter, Hughes responded to Kilpatrick’s assertion that Negroes had not contributed to Western civilization by referencing Percy Julian, Adam Clayton Powell, Ralph Bunche, W. C. Handy, and Martin Luther King Jr. She concluded the letter with a mixture of the two anthems: “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 for WE SHALL SURELY OVERCOME!”25
That summer, over twenty years after A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had begun to plan their March on Washington, it finally happened. Toward the end of the march, a star-studded, televised, and relatively sanitized display of movement energies, Benjamin Mays began his benediction with the first words of the third verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: “God of History of all mankind. God of Abraham and Moses, Amos and Isaiah, Jesus and Paul. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.” It was a subtle warning and reference, modest and barely noticeable to the untrained ear. Other things were clearly noticeable, though. DuBois had died mere hours before the march began, as an expatriate living in Ghana. Both women activists and more radical voices of the movement in general were absent from the program. And notwithstanding the power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s gorgeous speech, and the national attention the march garnered, the federal government was still failing to adequately support the members of SNCC working under harrowing conditions in the Mississippi Delta and Alabama.
Mays’s prayer to the “God of our weary years” was a prophetic supplication in advance of the tragedy to come. In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, just shy of three weeks after the March on Washington, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, near the basement. At a little after 10:00 that morning, Sunday school children walked into the basement assembly room to prepare for the day’s sermon. It was titled “The Love That Forgives.” The bomb exploded, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins (age fourteen), Denise McNair (age eleven), Carole Robertson (age fourteen), and Cynthia Wesley (age fourteen). Addie’s younger sister Sara and twenty-one other people at the church were injured. A gaping hole was left in the rear wall. The back steps were blown away. All but one of the stained glass windows were shattered. The one that remained showed Jesus Christ with a group of little children.
Black Birmingham furiously took to the streets in response. Abraham Wood, pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church of Birmingham and president of the local branch of the SCLC, described how he “dashed to that scene. . . . I found a group of young blacks with a pile of rocks and every car that passed with a white driver in it, they were tearing it up.”26 The boys rejected his pleas that they maintain “nonviolent resistance.” One child protester, thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware, who is today barely remembered, was also killed by a group of white men in the uproar.
The tragedy in Birmingham revealed that nonviolent resistance required extraordinary discipline and courage. It faced barbaric attacks against the very idea of black citizenship. And at times it felt like too high a price to pay. That day Wood said to himself, “Not going to be long till this thing is going to take a new turn,” a turn away from forms of resistance that required forbearance in response to obscene violence. This shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone. The three-story Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham had been a rallying site. It was where the students who were arrested during the 1963 Birmingham campaign’s Children’s Crusade were trained. It was where two generations of black communities had met, organized, socialized, and developed plans for freedom. That September morning it became the site of a terrorist attack on the black community, a violent punishment for asserting their long overdue rights to citizenship.
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The act was supposed to guarantee equal application of voter registration requirements and finally ban racial segregation in schools, workplaces, and facilities that served the general public, under the authority granted to Congress through the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. For several years, the U.S. Department of Justice had brought lawsuits to support black voting rights, but local judges and voting registrars consistently thwarted these efforts. And they continued to do so even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Concurrently, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked with local black organizations to promote voter registration in various parts of the South. Again, local authorities were intransigent. However, black people in the Selma area, more rural and less resistant historically than those in Birmingham, were becoming more organized and militant. They wanted to ratchet up their movement and bring more people to Selma to wage struggle. Selma residents invited Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC to their city in January 1965. Soon thereafter daily marches began. They were focused in particular on voting ri
ghts. Although the Selma community had been organizing for years prior to King’s arrival, his presence drew more attention to the small city than it had ever received before. When King was arrested in Selma, the New York Times published an open letter he sent to them that dramatically asserted, “THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS.”27
Mass rallies were held in churches and schools. Groups of teachers protested, students protested, and families protested. The activists had a series of confrontations with the violent agents of white supremacy, including police who routinely beat and sometimes killed protesters. The passion these state actors had for racism made those charged with upholding the law appear to be the lawless ones. And the presence of television cameras, witnesses for the nation, helped the organizers shift national public opinion to their cause.
On March 3, King announced a plan to march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. The marchers were confronted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, somewhat appropriately named after a Confederate army general. As the confrontation began, ABC was showing the film Judgment at Nuremburg. It depicted the trials of Nazi war criminals. The movie was interrupted to report on the scene in Montgomery. State troopers beat 600 unarmed marchers with billy clubs, fists, and feet. They blinded them with tear gas, and chaos ensued. Forty-eight million viewers witnessed America’s home-grown fascism for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.
The next day, a call was sent out by Selma organizers for clergy from across the country to come and support them. Approximately 450 people arrived quickly, including the Unitarian minister James Reeb of Boston. The night of his arrival, he ate dinner at an integrated restaurant with two of his colleagues, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller. They walked into the balmy Selma night and were accosted and beaten by a group of white locals. Reeb was driven to a hospital in Birmingham, where he died from his injuries two days later. His funeral was held in Selma on March 15.
Representatives of various religious traditions came to Selma to pay tribute to James Reeb. Some of the speakers at the funeral, unfortunately, treated Reeb, a white man, as an exceptional victim. In truth, his story was yet another tragedy. He was one of a very long line of victims, including Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old black organizer who had been killed two weeks prior to Reeb. Reporters described the funeral in general as more than a little disorganized. It was filled with a motley crew of people, many of whom had had no part in the movement but who had just come down to partake in its latest devastation.
When King took to the podium, however, he made meaning of the gathering. He called them all to accountability, asking rhetorically, “Who killed Jim Reeb?” A few ignorant men, he answered. He then asked, “What killed Jim Reeb?” An irrelevant church, he answered, an indifferent clergy, an irresponsible political system, a corrupt law enforcement hierarchy, a timid federal government, and an uncommitted black population.
He encouraged everyone to put their bodies on the line to destroy segregation. He challenged them to see that Jim Reeb’s death wasn’t in vain and that his work would continue.
King’s eulogy began with references to Romeo and Juliet but ended with Hamlet. He took the mourners from romance to tragedy, from idealistic hope to reckoning. According to the program, the benediction of the service was supposed to be offered by a rabbi, after which the congregation would sing “We Shall Overcome.” A Life magazine reporter noted this didn’t quite happen:
In everyone’s combined weariness and exultation things got a bit mixed up. We were all on our feet, holding crossed-over hands, swaying and singing before the rabbi could reach the pulpit. The surprises overwhelmed me as I watched [a] bearded primate intoning the moving Negro anthem: felt the two men on either side tugging my crossed arms, even heard my own voice seem to soar. Then suddenly as we were all humming the final verse the rabbi got started. Over the throbbing church filled ecumenical hum of more than 400 nuns and clerics, we could clearly hear him intone the Kaddish, the ancient Hebrew prayer for the dead.28
The “Negro anthem” they intoned was not “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The congregation sang “We Shall Overcome.” In some ways this signaled the ultimate displacement of “Lift Every Voice.” “We Shall Overcome” was in the eyes of the nation, and in the lungs of protesters, the anthem of the civil rights movement. The day of Rev. Reeb’s funeral, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress and announced that he would introduce a Voting Rights Act for African Americans in the South. Seventy million Americans watched his announcement on TV. Johnson used the phrase “We Shall Overcome” as a refrain, saying, “It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Later in the speech he added, “These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too—poverty, disease and ignorance—we shall overcome.” But the conclusion to his speech reveals much more: “At the real heart of the battle for equality is a deep-seated belief in the democratic process. Equality depends, not on the force of arms or tear gas, but depends upon the force of moral right—not on recourse to violence, but on respect for law and order.”
The law had only rarely and recently been on the side of civil rights protesters. This legislation was the exception, rather than the rule. In many if not most other instances, “order,” when it came to black communities, was nothing more than a streamlined system of racial domination. Whereas movement people had adopted the Augustinian principle that “that which is not just, is not law,” or at least not binding upon people of conscience, President Johnson revealed what would be the constrained scope of this landmark civil rights legislation.
The march resumed in Selma, from March 21 to 25. This time, President Johnson provided federal troops to protect the marchers. This protection required disabling three bombs that were set along the route. Violent racism wouldn’t die easily. Once they arrived in Montgomery, the marchers gathered for a festival-like rally. Harry Belafonte; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Odetta; and Joan Baez all performed. Nina Simone sang “Mississippi Goddam,” reflecting the rebirth of militancy.
But before the party, King spoke to the crowd, which numbered around 25,000 people. He was poignant and impassioned; he recalled the loss of life and the hardship of the past several years of struggle:
We’ve come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated upon the American mind. James Weldon Johnson put it eloquently. He said:
We have come over a way
That with tears hath been watered. (Yes, sir.)
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered. (Yes, sir.)
Out of the gloomy past, (Yes, sir.)
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam
Of our bright star is cast. (Speak, sir.)
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” became antiphonal as King recited it and the people responded:
Today I want to tell the city of Selma. (Tell them, Doctor.) Today I want to say to the state of Alabama. (Yes, sir.) Today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. (Yes, sir.) We are on the move now. (Yes, sir.)
Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. (Yes, sir.) We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. (Yes, sir.) The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. (Yes, sir.) We are on the move now. (Yes, sir.)
At the conclusion, his dance with the Negro National Anthem shifted to the phrasing at the end of the first verse, “Let us march on”:
Let us therefore continue our triumphant march (Uh huh) to the realization of the American dream. (Yes, sir.) Let us march on segregated housing (Yes, sir) until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and
whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. (Yes, sir.) Let us march on segregated schools (Let us march, Tell it) until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially healing context of the classroom. Let us march on poverty (Let us march) until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. (Yes, sir.) March on poverty (Let us march) until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns (Yes, sir) in search of jobs that do not exist.
By most accounts, Selma marked a victory. But King’s citation of the second verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” revealed his more nuanced feelings about the moment. This was no mere sentimental or poetic gesture toward the old anthem in the midst of a new day. King went to a resource, a verse, that spoke particularly to grief. The Selma march led to a legislative victory, yes, but at such a heavy price: the deaths of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Jonathan Daniels, a New England Seminarian–turned–civil rights protester who was murdered in Alabama, and James Reeb. Soon the triumphant protesters would learn that Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who had come south to support the movement, was shot to death by Klan members on that day of celebration. And after her death her reputation would be sullied in the press by those who could not imagine anything but a prurient reason for a white mother joining the freedom movement. For years, and even generations, death had been the response the society offered in response to black freedom dreams. The triumphalist narrative that is generally offered of Selma minimizes how tortured the time actually was, and how the Voting Rights Act, as King and so many other organizers knew, would not solve the hunger, joblessness, exploitation, and police brutality that black Americans experienced in a racist society.
