Song of Faith

A thousand Negroes stood last week in a public park in Dallas singing to an orchestra's accompaniment. On the program was a number entitled Lift Every Voice and Sing. Called out Director A. H. Jackson: "How many of you know the song?" Almost every hand shot up.

Wherever Negroes gather in the U.S., hands rise just as quickly to such a question. To them Lift Every Voice and Sing is the No. 2 song to the national anthem. While white people bemoan the lack of suitable patriotic songs, even find fault with The Star-Spangled Banner's annoying octave-and-a-half range, colored people have quietly adopted a rousing anthem of their own.

Lift Every Voice's rolling phrases and solemn, striding music (hintful of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana) are not new. They were whipped out in 1900 by two Negroes for a Lincoln's Birthday celebration of Negro schoolchildren in Jacksonville. Author is the late James Weldon Johnson, writer, lyricist, educator, first Negro to become a U.S. consul, secretary for 14 years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Composer is his equally famed brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, popular song writer (Under the Bamboo Tree, Nobody's Lookin' but the Owl and the Moon), collector and arranger of spirituals, onetime musical director for Oscar Hammerstein, now (at 69) a minor actor in the revival of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The Johnson brothers thought little of their song after finishing it, but Jacksonville children continued to carol it, passed it on to other Negro schools. Since then it has sold half a million copies, exists also on countless thousands of typewritten pages pasted in the backs of hymnals and school songbooks. It is a standard selection, especially popular as a quartet number, in Negro colleges, has also spread to white groups.

Timelier today than its author could have realized is its first chorus:

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.*

* Reproduced with permission of the copyright owners: Edward M. Marks Music Corp.

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