by Imani Perry
These were lofty goals and proved too difficult to bring to fruition. This had a good deal to do with Reagan’s power and his Congress. Once elected, Reagan made good on his vision to eradicate much of the success of the civil rights movement. He described poor black women as “welfare queens” who were too heavy a tax burden. Having opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it was passed, as president he sought to limit the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan claimed that such protections for black voters were an unconstitutional infringement on “states’ rights.” His backlash against civil rights didn’t end there: Reagan was also an outspoken critic of affirmative action, condemning “racial quotas” as a form of reverse racism only two decades after the end of legally mandated racial segregation. Reagan consistently appointed conservative justices to federal courts as part of his bid to dismantle the practice.
Reagan’s rejection of the politics of the black freedom movement was international as well. In 1983, during his first term, the U.S. military invaded Grenada, a small black island that had a friendly relationship with Cuba and a community of black American radical expatriates. In contrast, Reagan maintained a friendly relationship with South Africa, notwithstanding its practice of racial apartheid, and he vetoed a bill for sanctions against South Africa that Congress had passed and a majority of Americans supported.
Reagan’s administration also reduced funding for critical social welfare programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (which trained citizens and provided them with public sector jobs), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. This meant investigations and prosecutions of school and housing discrimination were effectively null and void under his administration. Wages and employment dropped, and incarceration dramatically increased during his two terms.
Reagan had a few black allies on the right wing. One was Tony Brown, who was well known for a multidecade-running PBS talk show Tony Brown’s Journal and often sounded like a Booker T. Washington redux. Brown believed that African Americans had to earn social membership with economic development. His uplift politics included advocacy for historically black colleges, and his show routinely featured a wide range of black guests who, to his credit, represented the entire political spectrum and often did not share his beliefs. In 1985, Brown founded the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans with the motto “Buy Freedom.” It was intended as a “buy black” initiative to support black free enterprise. Participating businesses were supposed to display a “freedom seal” that would be a sign to consumers that the businesses would give discounts, offer competitive prices, and be active in supporting the local community.
Brown’s campaign began with a “Call to Freedom,” during which participating black radio stations across the country played “Lift Every Voice and Sing” simultaneously.10 However, Brown found few stations, businesses, or individuals willing to participate. He didn’t adequately account for how vulnerable black-owned businesses actually were. They needed capital, far more than a seal, to be competitive in the 1980s. To say that Brown was naive, and more than that, that Ronald Reagan was bad news for black America, however, is not to say that Reagan defeated black American political aspiration. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while not garnering him the Democratic nomination, were remarkably successful. Under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition, a term first used by slain Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, Jackson built a multiracial constituency of voters who cared about the lot of working people and minority populations.
Furthermore, beyond electoral politics, the student antiapartheid movement was robust in the United States, notwithstanding Reagan’s declaration that Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of South Africa’s African National Congress, was a terrorist. In the spring of 1985, 211 people were arrested at Cornell University after students occupied the main administrative building. They demanded that the university divest from its holdings in South Africa. At Harvard, antiapartheid activists set up shantytowns on the Yard in the center of campus to represent the conditions black South Africans lived in under apartheid. Students at Swarthmore College marched into a Swarthmore board meeting to protest the school’s financial investments in South Africa, and at Haverford students held a two-day sit-in at one of the administrative offices. Students at Georgetown and Howard University joined forces to create a Washington, D.C., antiapartheid student organization, as did students at Fisk and Vanderbilt in Nashville. In Atlanta, student protesters at Morehouse were visited by Bishop Desmond Tutu and Andrew Young, and Spelman College brought South African youth speakers to campus to inform students about life under apartheid. Students at Columbia, Penn State, Yale, and Occidental, among other universities, were successful in leading their institutions to disinvest partially and sometimes even wholly from South Africa. By 1988, 155 schools had done so.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was often sung at antiapartheid protests in the United States, on campuses and in the streets, along with another song, “Nkosi Sikeleli iAfrica.” “Nkosi” was written in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga, a South African Methodist minister. Just as “Lift Every Voice” had been a song of freedom in the early years of Jim Crow, “Nkosi” was an important freedom anthem as apartheid took root in South Africa. For a time it also served as the national anthem of Zambia, Tanzania, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. The twinned performances of two black anthems in the 1980s were a sign that despite the failure of Pan-Africanism to develop into a sustained global movement, some of its threads remained. Apartheid would not be dismantled until 1994, after a long struggle. Yet in South Africa, other independent African nations, the United States, and the Caribbean it seemed that the centuries-long global system of white supremacy was intransigent, and even the most extraordinary victories still didn’t unsettle racial inequality.
Between the rolling back of civil rights legislation and the U.S. government’s support for South Africa, it would be easy to simply state that the freedom movement had completely failed by the 1980s. But in truth, some of its principles had taken root in the profession of the United States to be an egalitarian and “color-blind” country. But practice and profession were mismatched. As a result, a distinctive form of racial discourse emerged in those years, one that reflected the tension between the rightward drift of the nation and the lingering energy of the antiwar, feminist, indigenous, and black liberation movements.
Even Reagan with his coded segregationist language understood he had to at least pay lip service to the promise of racial equality. Americans were not supposed to be racist anymore. And so racial animus had to be displaced. Instead of traditional claims that black people were inherently inferior, it became commonplace to hear that the suffering of the black poor was caused by their deficient character and anti-American ways of being. This allowed white Americans to avoid both charges of racism and the responsibility to atone for the persistence of American racism. This shift was clear during President Reagan’s remarks at a 1982 National Black Republican Council Dinner. Reagan asserted that he would not write off the black vote, because for too long black people had been taken for granted by one party and written off by the other. He described the Republican Party as an ally of black people, citing his placement of 130 blacks in “top executive policy making positions” on the basis of merit rather than race. He spoke about supporting black business but decried Great Society and social welfare programs as bad for business and the nation. He rejected “throwing tax money” at a problem and claimed that dependence upon public assistance was the cause of black poverty. It was an elaborate doublespeak, praise for black people in each moment coupled with standard racial narratives of black inferiority, dependence, and laziness.
Reagan concluded his remarks with a nod to, and an interpretation of, “Lift Every Voice”:
Earlier in the program you sang, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The third verse to that beautiful hymn ends with the words, “May we forever stand true to o
ur God and our native land.” Tonight, let us make that pledge. Let us be true to our God and native land by standing by the ideals of liberty and opportunity that are so important to our heritage as free men and women. Let us prove again that America can truly be a promised land, a land where people of every race, creed, and background can live together in freedom, harmony, and prosperity. And let us proclaim for all to hear that America will have brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
It was as though, at least according to Reagan, marketing had fully displaced content. Marketing themselves as “black friendly” was supposed to stand in for substance, at least for the National Black Republican Council. Consumer culture was not simply expanding, it was also beginning to define American identity and politics. How politicians marketed themselves and the degree to which they actually represented the interests of the constituencies they claimed increasingly diverged.
For black politicians, there were a greater array of choices about alliances and allegiances, especially given that their actions could diverge from the desires of their voting constituents, if they had enough financial or institutional support from other sources. This dynamic became evident in Cleveland. For many years, Carl Stokes, mayor from 1967 to 1971, was at odds with the president of the Cleveland City Council, George Forbes. Both men were black. Stokes grew his support by making explicit appeals in the black community’s interest, whereas Forbes was a more conventionally loyal Democrat. Forbes was ultimately more powerful in the city, as his interests were often aligned with those of business elites. He supported tax abatements and incentives for the business class, and while he spoke out on issues like police brutality, his criticism of structural racism was modest at best.
In 1987, many years into their conflict, there were two separate Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial breakfast ceremonies in Cleveland. One intimate gathering took place under the leadership of Stokes. The other, under the banner of Forbes, featured the Cleveland Orchestra and most of the city’s black leaders. Stokes claimed to be the one who stood in the tradition of King. But he spoke to a much smaller audience. At both breakfasts the audience was asked to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It had always been embraced regardless of political perspective. The song was not aligned with a politics, it was aligned with a people. But the sense of linked fate that was once an integral part of the singing couldn’t be assumed. And the rival breakfasts were just one indication of that.
Black Americans were increasingly included in the media marketing landscape of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the black middle class was pulling away from the black poor. This distance was evidenced in electoral politics as well as mass culture. Black magazines increasingly featured the black elite, who were largely distinguished by their fancy cars and vast homes rather than by their achievement or work as race men and women. They came to represent the aspirational image of black America. One black advertising firm, Mingo-Jones, was particularly successful in tapping into black markets with aspirational imagery. Their clients included American Express and the National Urban League. In 1979, the agency developed the slogan “We Do Chicken Right!” for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Even beer advertising, which was historically white, white, and more white, learned to market to blacks more successfully by hiring Mingo-Jones. When Miller Brewing launched Miller Lite in the 1970s, it wanted to convey a manly image (with the subtext that “lite” beer was not a girly diet drink). With Mingo-Jones they had already created a memorable, and successful, string of TV ads that featured retired black professional athletes, and Miller returned to them to sell its new beer.
Miller wanted a special, targeted campaign to woo black drinkers to Miller High Life. So Deborah McDuffie, the first female composer in the advertising industry, was approached to write a Black History Month jingle for the brand. McDuffie had worked with many popular musicians and could enlist a wide array of talent. She arranged what she termed “a celebratory, contemporary version of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’” and recorded it with a host of prominent singers including Al Green and Deniece Williams backed by Patti Austin, Roberta Flack, Melba Moore, and Deborah herself. She used the Blues Brothers band, and Leon Pendarvis was the musical director. The album they produced was distributed to select groups. For example, all the attendees at the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Convention that year received copies. In addition to the record, Miller printed up colorful posters with the words “Lift Every Voice” boldly printed across the top. The blue background was covered in Matisse-like abstract black bodies, with the first verse of the anthem written in multiple colors from top to bottom. Stamped in the bottom right corner was the logo “Miller High Life.” The brand manager of Miller Lite, Barren Barrett, said, “The anthem is about faith hope and above all the pride and dignity of a people. Like the spirituals which are so much a part of America’s diverse culture, the message of the anthem is universal.”11
In this era, to be “for” black people, nominally, could mean absolutely nothing of substance. It might simply mean somebody was trying to sell something, or, in the tradition of Reagan, it might actually mean a paternalistic damnation. Frank speech was needed to clear away the underbrush of race in America.
Then came hip-hop.
In the final year of the 1980s, Spike Lee, a young, brilliant, brash, and black film director, released his second feature, Do the Right Thing. It is the story of a sweltering day in New York and a racial conflagration that begins when a young black man, played by Lee himself, complains that there are no images of “brothers” on the wall at the Italian-owned pizzeria he frequents. It concludes with the murder of another young black man by means of a police chokehold. The film was inspired by a series of racially charged deaths in New York: the Howard Beach death of Michael Griffith, who was struck by a car as he ran from a violent white mob, and the police murders of Eleanor Bumpers and Michael Stewart. Spike Lee asked Chuck D, the frontman for the socially conscious rap group Public Enemy, to create a hip-hop version of “Lift Every Voice” for the film, but Chuck D declined. He had come of age in the black power era and considered the song sacred. Instead the group came up with a new anthem, “Fight the Power.”
The movie begins with a solitary horn playing strains of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and then suddenly actress Rosie Perez bursts on to the screen, dancing hard and fast to “Fight the Power.” The sharp lyrics—“Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me, a straight up racist the sucker was simple and plain, mother fuck him and John Wayne! I’m ready, I’m hyped cause I’m amped, most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp!”—were an example par excellence of the newest and most energetic form of popular music: hip-hop. Hip-hop was irreverent, bold, sacrilegious when it came to formalism, and relentlessly vernacular. Hip-hop artists wore the casual clothing of quotidian life in urban centers, not the tailored suits and ball gowns of performers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, or the elaborate and wild costumes of performing artists of the 1970s. As R&B music lost nearly all of its political content in the 1980s, and became increasingly sentimental and “smooth,” hip-hop was unflinching and explicitly both hard and political, even when it didn’t have an overt political message. It was the music of the young people dispossessed by the Reagan era. It was the music of migrants and their descendants, from the Caribbean and the South, from the country to the city, who arrived to far less opportunity than hoped for, and with only their resilience and rich cultural archive to rely upon.
The introduction of hip-hop into black popular culture must be understood alongside the diminishing sphere of black institutional life. Hip-hop’s transgressions against norms of what it meant to be respectful and appropriate spoke to its frankly adolescent sensibilities. It also was indebted to the black power era, and the “rapping” and poetry of the Black Arts Movement. It was street. It was a resourceful collage, a threading together of technology and bits and pieces of the world surrounding the youth and their languages. It was the music made in the shadows of Reagan, crack cocaine, and COINTELP
RO, and without paternalistic oversight.
Melba Moore recorded a version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in 1990, the throes of the hip-hop era. It was somewhat popular and brought together a panoply of stars with a beautiful music video. Her choice to rely upon the visual in addition to sound belied an awareness of the growing importance of the visual in popular music with the rise of music television and videos. Yet despite its beauty, Moore’s song honestly sounded old-fashioned in comparison to the newer and harder-hitting form of music.
Although it always had a multiracial audience and artists, hip-hop remained primarily popular with black and Latino communities until 1992, when the West Coast gangsta rap album The Chronic became a massive crossover success. For years, mainstream moral panics had been ginned up about hip-hop due to its explicit and profane content. But the rise of gangsta rap alarmed even older black folks, who were familiar with gutbucket hits and blues ballads of lawlessness but nothing so explicitly vulgar and antisocial. However, the widespread generalization of all hip-hop as “gangsta” simply because that was the style most popular with white audiences was a gross mischaracterization. The music developed a range of regional, political, and aesthetic variations. There were hip-hop Afrocentrists and revolutionaries, middle-class suburban kids, language lovers, bookworms, and counterculture hippies, along with those who spread the gospel of street hustling.
Despite this wide variation and many excellent hip-hop acts of various sorts, when the Fugees burst on the scene, they were distinctive. Their name was short for “refugees,” and they turned the sensationalistic and racist representations of Haitians in popular media upside down by embracing the term refugee. These artists refused shame and expressed allegiance to the least of these. The trio, Haitian Wyclef Jean, Haitian American Pras Michel, Lauryn Hill, and producers Jerry Wonder, Salaam Remi, and John Forté created a magnificent sophomore album, The Score, which earned them a Grammy Award and multiplatinum sales. During live shows, the Fugees often began their performances with Wyclef Jean playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on the electric guitar with his tongue. It wailed and moaned, reminiscent of how Jimi Hendrix once played “The Star-Spangled Banner” but also suggestive of how Marvin Gaye interpreted the national anthem, both sensual and erotic. One such performance was at the 1996 BET awards. Clef’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice” breaks up. It is choppy and ephemeral. Then he smashes the guitar into pieces. Almost immediately, the driving beat of Mary J. Blige’s hip-hop soul classic “Real Love” follows, and Hill emerges from backstage rhyming, alto-voiced, and supremely confident. The crowd screams its approval.
