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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
Inaugurated on February 12, 1900, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became “The Negro National Anthem.” Writer James Weldon Johnson and musician John Rosamond Johnson, his brother, composed its words and music to honor Abraham Lincoln's birthday at the Colored High School in Jacksonville, Florida. It was “sung by schoolchildren–a chorus of five hundred voices.”
During the next two decades black institutions and organizations – educational, religious, social, and civic – sang and adopted it. It invoked the African American journey from slavery to freedom. “The song not only epitomizes the history of the race, and its present condition, but voices their hope for the future,” the Johnsons declared in 1926, the first year of Negro History Week. Augusta Savage also sculpted “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1939), a black choir in the form of a harp. The song's lyrics on struggle and aspiration especially resonate in the observance of Black History Month.
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