From Poetry Foundation: A
group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate
Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I
decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words
and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made
mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a
chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my
brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song
passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept
singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became
teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was
being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today
the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally
used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of
exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children. -James
Weldon Johnson
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
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,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
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,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land. |
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