James Weldon Johnson captured the pain, anguish, frustration, faith, and hope experienced by former slaves and their descendants in a land they were forced to call home. He expressed these sentiments in thirty-four lines of poetry that were later set to music and are now widely recognized as the Black National Anthem.
The original manuscript, along with other papers by Johnson, is currently held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Johnson, who was Black, wrote the piece in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1900. The work was created as part of a celebration for Abraham Lincoln's birthday.
Johnson's brother, John Rosamond Johnson, later composed the music for the poem. The song received its first performance by Black children in a Jacksonville school where James Weldon Johnson served as the principal. Yollie Copeland, a licensed tour guide in Jacksonville and the owner of Explore Jax Core, notes that a significant part of the song's legacy is its intergenerational transmission.
According to Copeland, the song was passed from generation to generation after that initial performance. She explains that the same children and students who performed the song as adults later taught it to their own students. Copeland recalls that Johnson wrote he had kind of forgotten about the song, but decades later he was surprised to hear it being sung and could not believe how widely it had caught on.
The song was later adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was sung at marches and other events during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 2001, singer Kim Weston performed the piece at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington during the first inauguration of President George W. Bush.
The lyrics of the song reference perseverance leading to freedom and liberty. They allude to the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln, which freed all slaves held in the Confederate states. One verse describes the road as stony and the chastening rod as bitter, noting that weary feet have come to the place for which their fathers sighed.
Following that verse, the lyrics state that the singers have come over a way watered with tears and have tread their path through the blood of the slaughtered. The text concludes by describing their emergence from a gloomy past to stand at last where the white gleam of their bright star is cast.
Jacqueline Lewis, a senior minister and public theologian at Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan, describes the song as an American treasure. She states that it is a song about her faith and the faith of others, specifically the faith in a God whose destination is liberation and whose purpose is to free all people.
Lewis believes that America could find hope in this song because it is honest about trouble, pain, and struggle. The song has become a standard in Black churches and in Black History Month programs across the United States.
This story is part of a recurring series titled American Objects, which is marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.
