Written originally for Lincoln, 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' now revered
as Black National Anthem
[October 21, 2026]
By COREY WILLIAMS
In 34 lines, James Weldon Johnson told of the pain, anguish,
frustration, faith and hope that former slaves and their descendants
experienced in a land and country they were forced to call home.
He did it in “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,” a poem that later became a
song and is now widely called the Black National Anthem. The original
manuscript along with other papers by Johnson, who was Black, are held
by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Johnson wrote “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing” in Jacksonville, Florida, as
part of a celebration in 1900 for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. His
brother, John Rosamond Johnson, later composed the music. It first was
performed by Black children in a Jacksonville school where James Weldon
Johnson was principal.
The song was later adopted by the NAACP and sung at marches and other
events during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Singer
Kim Weston performed it in 2001 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
during the first inauguration of President George W. Bush. It has become
a standard in Black churches and in Black History Month programs across
the United States.
Yollie Copeland, a licensed tour guide in Jacksonville and owner of
Explore Jax Core, says part of the song's legacy is that after the
initial performance, it was passed from generation to generation.
“Those same children and students (as adults) taught the song to their
students," Copeland says. "James Weldon Johnson writes that he kind of
forgot about the song. Decades later they were singing his song. He just
couldn’t believe it caught.”
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The handwritten manuscript for, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,"
originally titled, "National Hymn," by James Weldon Johnson, is
displayed at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, in New Haven, Conn. (AP
Photo/Jessica Hill)
 The song's lyrics tell of
perseverance leading to freedom and “liberty” with Lincoln's 1863
signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves
held in the Confederate states. Lyrics include “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?”
That verse is followed by “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, ’til now we stand at
last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”
Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister and public theologian at Middle
Collegiate Church in Manhattan, calls “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” an
“American treasure."
“This is a song about my faith, our faith," she says. "The faith is
in the God whose destination is liberation, the God whose purpose is
to free people, all the people. So, I think America could find its
hope in this song that is honest about trouble and honest about pain
and honest about struggle.”
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