In recent years, the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has reentered the public consciousness. Depending on who is telling the story, the work is either a Christian hymn, a celebration of the African American experience, or a separate national anthem for a separate people. Amidst the debates and ballyhoo over the song’s sometimes inclusion at sports events alongside the Star-Spangled Banner, very little is ever said of the piece’s lyricist, James Weldon Johnson.
This man led an eventful life to the highest degree, he not only wrote over 200 other popular songs but also advised two American presidents, served as the official US Consul in Nicaragua and Venezuela, filled various leadership capacities at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was part of the failed but nonetheless fruitful effort to make lynching a federal crime. James Weldon Johnson offered through both his observances and compositions a window to the burgeoning American music industry, the struggles and joys of African American lives, and geo-political changes that occurred in the first half of the 20th Century.
Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, to a waiter father and homemaker mother, Johnson’s first exposure to music was through the church. Though through most of James Weldon’s life he would retain a kind of agnosticism on the existence and nature of God, the church wo
