- Actress Sheryl Lee Ralph performed "Lift Every Voice and Sing" at Super Bowl 2023 on Sunday.
- The hymn was composed in 1900 during the civil rights movement and became the "Black national anthem" in 1919.
The song known as the Black national anthem was the target of Republican lawmakers' ire after it was performed at the Super Bowl on Sunday for the very first time.
Rep. Lauren Boebert said in a tweet that the NFL was trying to "divide" the country and railed against "wokeness" in an apparent reference to actress Sheryl Lee Ralph's performance of "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
"America only has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM," she wrote. "Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing multiple!? Do football, not wokeness."
But the song carries a rich legacy rooted in freedom, unity, and equality, holding a powerful place in American history.
Composed during the civil rights movement
In 1900, James Weldon Johnson, a writer and leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wrote a hymn called "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
The US was in the early years of the civil rights movement, catalyzed just a few years earlier by the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine.
Johnson originally wanted to write a poem in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Instead, galvanized by African Americans' fight for equality, he decided to write one about the struggles they faced following the Reconstruction era, when racism in the country was at its most overt and rampant.
The lyrics include allusions to the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow system, as well as the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
"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 'til victory is won," the hymn states.
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" was first recited by a group of 500 students at a segregated school in 1900. The poem was later set to the music by Johnson's brother J. Rosamond Johnson, a composer and singer during the Harlem Renaissance. When the brothers moved from Jacksonville to New York City, they brought the song with them.
Becoming the Black national anthem
The song swiftly spread through Black American communities across the nation, becoming a rallying cry in the face of adversity and strife. In 1919, 12 years before "The Star Spangled Banner" was adopted as the national anthem, the NAACP dubbed "Lift Every Voice and Sing" the "Negro national anthem."
Since then, prominent Black American writers and musicians have performed or referenced the song, from James Brown, who's known as the "godfather of soul," to Jon Batiste, the Grammy-winning bandleader of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" gained renewed popularity and attention amid nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Protestors sang the song during demonstrations and other events, and Joe Biden referenced the hymn in his plan for addressing racial disparities in the country, titled "Lift Every Voice: The Biden Plan for Black America."
Sporting events also began to incorporate the hymn, from NASCAR to the NFL, which announced that it would be performed as part of pre-game ceremonies during the 2020 season.
In January 2021, Rep. Jim Clyburn sponsored a bill proposing that "Lift Every Voice and Sing" be designated as the "national hymn" of the US.
In response to criticism that a Black national anthem signals a desire of separatism by Black communities, Hilary O. Shelton, NAACP's then-senior vice president of advocacy and policy, told CNN in 2010 that the hymn "was adopted and welcomed by a very interracial group, and it speaks of hope in being full first-class citizens in our society."
"It is evident in our actions as an organization and here in America it is evidence that we are about inclusion, not exclusion," Shelton said. "To claim that we as African Americans want to form a confederation or separate ourselves from white people because of one song is baffling to me."