On August 27, 1960, a group of black students did a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in downtown Jacksonville, Florida.
At the same time a group of 200 white men gathered in nearby Hemming Park. The leaders, most of whom were members of the KKK, passed out ax-handles and baseball bats and proceeded to the restaurant where they attacked the students. The melee spread to the streets, and every black citizen in the area was attacked. Many were badly injured. Johnny Holden, who was 44 at the time and had come downtown on an errand, remembers running for his life. At age 94 he could still name the streets he ran down to get away. This day became known as Ax Handle Saturday.
This unfortunate episode of black history is one of many that didn’t make the history books.
But Jacksonville’s history contains another story, that recently made headlines in the sports section. At the season opener in Kansas City on September 10, 2020, the NFL has chosen to play Lift Every Voice and Sing along with The Star-Spangled Banner.
Some people strongly oppose this decision and feel it is disrespectful to the National Anthem. Why?
Here’s how it all began. In 1900 James Weldon Johnson—citizen of Jacksonville, Florida, and principal of Stanton Elementary School, got some exciting news. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was planning a visit to his school, timing it to coincide the annual event that honored the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
Johnson, a man of many talents, wrote a poem which he felt expressed Lincoln’s belief in the hope and promise of America. James’ brother Rosamond, a composer, set the poem to music and it was performed by a chorus of 500 of the city’s black children.
The performance was well-received, but the Johnson brothers didn’t think too much more about it. They decided to pursue a musical career and left for Broadway where they composed lyrics and music for Broadway musical comedies. If you’ve ever heard the tune “Under the Bamboo Tree,” it was composed by the Johnson brothers in 1902 for the Broadway show Sally in Our Alley.
But the hopeful words and stirring melody of Lift Every Voice and Sing found other avenues. It became a popular addition to hymnals in black churches all over the country, and acquired a nickname, “the black national anthem.”
Though finding Broadway composing amusing, it was not what James was looking for. He deeply believed in the American dream and the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Jim Crow laws were stifling racial justice in his home town and all over the South.
He became a lawyer. Teddy Roosevelt appointed him consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the discord and uprisings in those countries made James even more concerned for his own country.
On his return to the United States in 1916, he became an organizer for the NAACP and devoted the rest of his life to civil rights activism. He opposed race riots in the north and lynchings in the south, which had increased after black soldiers returned from World War I. He led numerous peaceful protest marches including one of 10,000 black Americans down New York City’s Fifth Avenue. He was the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, and lobbied for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1921 which was passed by the House but defeated by the white Southern bloc in the Senate.
The song the Johnson Brothers composed for a children’s chorus lives on. Read the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing. You may agree that the NFL made a good choice, and that it is time for our country to move forward in unity and see ax handles as tools, not weapons.
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning 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?
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,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
***
Lucy Bell’s 35-year teaching career included over twenty years as a writing consultant. Her latest book, Coming Up, A Boy’s Adventures in 1940s Colorado Springs, combines narrative non-fiction with the history of the black community of Colorado Springs. It features rare historical photographs and the watercolor illustrations of Linda Martin. Release date: October 14, 2018. Her children’s novel, Molly and the Cat Who Stole Her Tongue, published in 2016, is available at Poor Richard’s Bookstore, Colorado Springs and Amazon.
