by Imani Perry
In the midst of all this blossoming, King was in trouble. He was caught between and betwixt. The other prominent civil rights leaders—Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin—decried black power. King resisted the slogan, but he also understood it and in some ways shared the sensibilities that led to it. He spoke out against the Vietnam War even though his peers warned him to stick to civil rights. King listened to the young people (SNCC had opposed the war from the outset) and to his own conscience. In April 1967, King led a 125,000-person rally against the war in New York’s Central Park. Ralph Bunche, Bayard Rustin, and Carl Rowan all spoke out publicly against the rally.
King retreated to Jamaica. In a house with no telephone, he sat with his thoughts and put together his final manuscript, Where Do We Go from Here? Later that year, he delivered a speech before the SCLC convention based upon portions of that book. In the book, King criticizes Western colonialism, neocolonialism, and economic exploitation. He calls for a movement to end poverty and debt. In the speech, he focused on the United States and the particular moment in the movement. Although he rejected communism theoretically, the speech was unabashedly critical of capitalism.
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. (Yes.) There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. (Yes.) And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. (Yes.) But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.6
King’s reckoning with the depth and complexity of racism, as interlocked as it was with the workings of capital, geopolitical relations, and the ideals of empire, had to be overwhelming.
I must confess, my friends (Yes, sir), that the road ahead will not always be smooth. (Yes.) There will still be rocky places of frustration (Yes) and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. (Yes.) And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. (Well.) Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. (Yes.) We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. (Well.) But difficult and painful as it is (Well), we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. (Well.) And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation from the words so nobly left by that great black bard, who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson (Yes):
Stony the road we trod (Yes),
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died. (Yes)
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. (Well)
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last (Yes)
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. (Well.) It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. (Yes.) When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair (Well), and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights (Well), let us remember (Yes) that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil (Well), a power that is able to make a way out of no way (Yes) and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. (Speak.)
Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Again, the second verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” came to King in a moment of confusion and crisis. He was demonized by the mainstream press and politicians for his stand against imperialism and the Vietnam War. His nonviolent tactics were ridiculed by younger militants who found the idea of sitting still while your brothers and sisters are being beaten and murdered unconscionable. And more than that, King was beginning to think that assimilation into American society, with its dangerous mores and questionable priorities, might be impossible to do with principle, and might even be undesirable.
But he continued his work. While organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington, King was drawn to Memphis. There, the all-black corps of sanitation workers were on strike. The sanitation workers suffered daily indignities and unfairness. In the 1950s and early 1960s garbage was collected in Memphis on flatbed trailers, meaning the sanitation workers were forced to sit in trash as they collected it. The trucks also lacked heaters. Because they weren’t allowed to stop and get a drink the men carried a cooler filled with ice water on hot days, but the water routinely became infested with maggots that crawled in from the garbage. The black workers had no place to relieve themselves, so they urinated in the garbage piles. And if the weather was bad, and they couldn’t collect garbage, black workers were sent home without pay, while white workers were allowed to spend the day at the work site without collecting trash and yet still receive full pay.7
But one particularly horrifying day precipitated the strike. Two men, named Cole and Walker, were standing in the truck’s barrel to protect themselves from the rain. “As Cole and Walker stood inside the cylinder designed to smash refuse mechanically, an electrical wire shorted and the compressor began to run. The button to stop the machine was on the outside of the truck, far from their reach. Before they could escape, the steel packer used to mangle the city’s garbage pulled Cole and Walker inside. Within seconds they were crushed to death.”
The families of the victims received $500 toward burial pay, one month’s salary, and nothing more. In the aftermath of this tragedy, and in light of years of abuse and exploitation, the sanitation workers decided to go on strike. Of the city’s 1,300 workers, 1,200 did not report to work on February 12. It was Lincoln’s birthday and the traditional beginning of Negro History Week.
The union demanded a pay increase, overtime pay, official recognition, and improved job safety as well as a procedure for grievances to be addressed. They began daily marches, with placards that poignantly read, “I AM A MAN.” There were some skirmishes. On February 23 a police car ran over the foot of a protester, Gladys Carpenter, who had been at the Selma to Montgomery March as well as the March against Fear. The men around Carpenter reacted by pushing against and rocking the police car. The police sprayed mace into the crowd and began hitting the demonstrators with nightsticks.
Soon the national press began to cover the strike. And civil rights leaders came down to support the workers, including Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin. After them, King arrived. Like Wilkins and Rustin, he expressed his support for the strike, and he promised to return soon. He spoke words that captured the energy of the historic moment. In the speech, he talked about the injustice of Vietnam abroad and poverty at home. He encouraged black citizens of Memphis to stand strong and refuse pressure to end their protests until their demands were met. He even talked about power, and though he didn’t use the term black power, he both signified on the slogan and recognized the need for it. “Power is the ability to effect change. We need power. What is Power? Walter Reuther once said that power is the ability of a labor union like U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, Ge
neral Motors, say yes when it wants to say no.”8 King was unflinching in his indictment of the hypocrisy of the American dream, and he asserted that when the Poor People’s Campaign descended upon Washington, people would come from every sector of the country, “and we’re going to take a shack by the Smithsonian Institute, so that it can stand there as a symbol of American life. Then we’re going to build a shanty town in Washington. We’re going to call it our City of Hope.”9 The next day, March 28, 1968, King led a march of thousands of African American protesters down Beale Street in Memphis. They took the same path that the cavalcade celebrating W. C. Handy had once taken. But the spirit was far from festive in 1968. Some of the younger marchers ripped their “I Am a Man” signs off the sticks and used the sticks to smash storefronts in the commercial district. The police responded with tear gas and nightsticks. Young people threw rocks. The police killed sixteen-year-old Larry Payne. The marchers never made it to City Hall.
The National Guard was called into Memphis and a curfew was ordered. King left and returned six days later to finish his work. King delivered his famous Mountaintop speech the night he returned to Memphis. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I have been to the mountaintop. . . . And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. I’m so happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The next day, standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, King was murdered. Nina Simone would name the tragedy this way: “The King of Love Is Dead.”
Uprisings ripped through black America. What hope was there, if even the King of Love was murdered? The aftermath was grief and rage. The Monday after King’s assassination, in Roxbury, a predominantly black Boston neighborhood, several thousand people gathered at White Stadium in Franklin Park. They took the American flag down and put up the Black Star flag of Ghana. Rev. Virgil Wood, the Boston representative of the SCLC, stood before the microphone: “We took down the flag that has dishonored us . . . and raised the flag which honored us. Now, we will not sing the anthem that has dishonored us but we will sing the one that has honored us.”10 The crowd sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” facing the Black Star.
The people reached for black power. It was philosophically inchoate, but it called for black people to imagine independent and protected black life. For some people this meant a journey of return to the black associational lifeworlds that had prepared them for the struggle. That, as far as they were concerned, was better than the fool’s gold of nominal integration. Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt of the Black Panther Party described how his coming of age in Morgan, Louisiana, prepared him to join the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the most widely remembered, and most broadly attacked, of the black power organizations that grew in the mid- to late 1960s: “Morgan City was a very rural setting and very nationalistic, self-reliant, and self-determining. It was a very close-knit community. Until I was a ripe old age, I thought that I belonged to a nation that was run by blacks. And across the street was another nation, a white nation. Segregation across the tracks. We had our own national anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ our own police, and everything. We didn’t call on the man across the street for nothing and it was very good that I grew up that way.” Communist Party activist and scholar, and Black Panther Party ally, Angela Davis, whose mother had been part of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, recalled the pride with which she sang the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice” at Tuggle Elementary School in Birmingham: “I always sang the last phrases full blast: Facing the Rising Sun, of a New Day Begun, Let us march on Til Victory is Won!”11 (Davis also sang it, in a very different setting, at the Little Red School House in New York, which she attended for high school.) In a 1975 interview that Maya Angelou conducted of her for a New York television show, Assignment America, Davis said, “If you went to a predominantly black school in the North and asked a particular class to stand up and sing the Negro National Anthem, there would be many children, many students who wouldn’t even know about the existence of the Negro National Anthem and would not recognize the name James Weldon Johnson. But when we were growing up, whenever there was an assembly, if we sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ or ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’ we also sang the Negro National Anthem and we learned that from the time we were 6 years old, or earlier than that actually.”12 Then, together, Angelou and Davis sang the first verse.
Sonia Sanchez, also a Birmingham native and a central figure in the Black Arts Movement, also recalled the importance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: “During my early school years we sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ at all weekly assemblies. . . . I vividly remember . . . the music teacher at the Parker School in Birmingham opening every event in town by saying ‘Spread the word . . . Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ That meant everyone rose and began singing.”13 When Sanchez moved to New York and the students at her school were asked to stand and sing the anthem, she and her sisters were the only ones who sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” while the rest of the auditorium sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A 1930 newspaper account of the music directors at Parker High School captures the memories that both Davis and Sanchez brought to their visions of 1960s black radicalism. The title is “Untwisting All the Chains That Tie the Hidden Soul of Harmony” and it reads, “They untwist them in chapel every morning at the Birmingham Industrial High School, when the 2,500 Negro boys and girls sing their ‘spirituals’ under M. L. Wilkerson’s lilting leadership there is nothing hidden of the soul for harmony which lives in their race. It pours from their throats, floods their faces, swells the vast chapel auditorium with a mighty volume and vitality of sound.”14 It was that register of soul and liberation that the turn to black power reimagined.
In retrospect, Andrew Young, a member of the SCLC who would become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, then mayor of Atlanta, described the shift in the early 1960s from “Lift Every Voice” to “We Shall Overcome” (and ultimately back to “Lift Every Voice” again) not so much as a displacement but rather as a reflection of the distinct applications of each song: “‘We Shall Overcome’ was always the closing song, expressing the prevailing hope that someday, things would be all right. But ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ laid out the road map through tragedy and triumph. For it is the God of our weary years and silent tears who points the way through the storm under the rainbow sign.”15 Connie Curry, the first white woman to serve on the executive committee of SNCC, described how the once-prevailing hope expressed by “We Shall Overcome” was dashed by persistent white violence in response to organizers, “those early sit-inners and SNCC people . . . really believed that they were going to win. It was the whole thing of ‘We Shall Overcome.’ They really sorta thought there was an end in sight, and when they would sing ‘God is on our side,’ I would never sing that verse. . . . I don’t think that anybody ever envisioned the long years of struggle and violence and everything—anguish.”16
A return road, and a distinct forward movement were taken up at once with the shifts of the late freedom movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s black organizers repurposed the cultural resources of the Deep South as well as those of continental Africa and used them to envision autonomous and liberated black living and thriving.
One of the limitations of the standard description of the post-1966 freedom movement as the black power era is that it can obscure how much of the energy of that period was devoted to the development of black consciousness, a term primarily associated with the philosophy of South African freedom fighter Steven Biko, and which he describes in his book, I Write What I Like: “At the heart of Black Consciousness is the realization by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. If one is free at heart, no man-made chains can bind
one to servitude, but if one’s mind is so manipulated and controlled by the oppressor then there will be nothing the oppressed can do to scare his powerful masters.” The strategies for developing that consciousness in the U.S. movement consisted of a simultaneous looking backward at the past while moving forward, a restoration of tradition while expunging the aspects of it associated with fear and internalized racism, and an explicit embrace of blackness itself.
Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement artist, activist, and intellectual, reflected on the significance of the anthem for him as someone who blossomed as a creator in the context of black power and black consciousness:
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was part of my growing up. Very early in my expanding perception I understood that at certain programs my parents took me to, the Negro National Anthem would be sung. . . . When we went down to Tuskegee, where my mother had attended normal school, and I saw a statue of Booker T. Washington pulling the cover of ignorance off the prototype slave, there was the anthem loud and heartfelt. . . . When we went down to Tennessee to visit Fisk, where she’d gone to college, where there were also those dynamite murals by Aaron Douglass, I remembered all my life, “Lift Every Voice” was sung further animating that gathering with the heap of heavy vibrations from the folks I saw, and I felt, black angels hovering invisibly, rah-rahing the proceedings.17
However, Baraka’s 1967 short play Home on the Range,18 first written to be performed at a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party when he was still called LeRoi Jones, made irreverent use of the anthem. The entire play was performed with avant-garde saxophonists performing strange improvisations in the background. In it, a black character named criminal breaks into the home of a white family as they’re watching television. criminal is frustrated that all their words to him sound like gibberish, and he yells and shoots the TV silent in response. Midway through the play, criminal morphs into a conductor: “He begins with great fanfare . . . with . . . now very haughty demeanor, turning to acknowledge an invisible audience to conduct the family singing; first a version of ‘America the Beautiful’ then a soupy stupid version of the Negro National Anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ which comes to a super-dramatic climax, with the criminal having been moved to tears, finally giving a super-military salute. As they reach the highest point of the song, suddenly a whole crowd of black people pushes through the door.”19 The play reads at once as an indictment of a certain form of sentimentalism attached to the song (somewhat consistent with Countee Cullen’s satire) and as a recognition of how deeply felt it was among all sorts of black folks, even those breaking into people’s houses and shooting them up. Later in his career, Baraka returned again to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” this time more reverently, as a reference point in “Funk Lore,” a piece by his performance group Blue Ark that told the story of black music and art from the Middle Passage to Malcolm X, backed by the playing of the anthem.
