Black History Month

If you watched the Super Bowl, you saw Sheryl Lee Ralph (from ABC’s Abbott Elementary) sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the Black national anthem.  It’s such a powerful song with a rich history and we’re singing it with our students this month.

James Weldon Johnson who was a writer and a leader of the NAACP wrote this poem in 1900.  It started as a poem to commemorate Lincolns’ birthday, but evolved into a piece that captured the struggles of Black Americans following reconstruction.  The song was first performed in 1900 by a group of 500 students at a segregated school.  His brother J. Rosamond Johnson later set the poem to music.  His brother was a composer and singer during the Harlem Renaissance and soon the song spread throughout black communities across the nation. The NAACP dubbed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as their official song in 1919 – twelve years before “The Star Spangled Banner” was adopted as the national anthem.

J. Rosamond Johnson played Frazier, a black lawyer in the original Broadway cast of Porgy and Bess.  The Johnson brothers wrote numerous songs, operettas, and musicals with composer, actor, producer, playwright Bob Cole.