Lift Every Voice and Sing: James Weldon Johnson and LaVilla
Near Jacksonville, Florida
On the afternoon of February twelfth, nineteen hundred, a group of schoolchildren assembled in a Jacksonville auditorium to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. They sang a new song, written for the occasion by a local teacher and his brother. The teacher was James Weldon Johnson.
The song was Lift Every Voice and Sing. James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville in eighteen seventy-one, in the neighborhood of LaVilla, a Black community just west of the downtown core that would in the coming decades become known as the Harlem of the South. He grew up in a household of unusual cultural ambition.
His mother was one of the first Black women to teach in a Florida public school. His father was the headwaiter at a major Jacksonville hotel. The family had books, had music, had access to a wider world than most Black Floridians of the Reconstruction era could reach.
Johnson trained as a lawyer and became the first Black man admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction, though he would leave Florida for New York before he could build much of a practice. His brother J. Rosamond Johnson set the Lincoln Day poem to music, and the song spread through Black communities across the country with a speed that neither brother had anticipated.
The NAACP adopted it as what it called the Negro National Anthem early in the twentieth century, and it has held that unofficial designation ever since. LaVilla was a remarkable place in the early decades of the twentieth century. It had its own professional district, its own entertainment corridors, its own hotels that hosted the major touring acts of the segregation era because Black performers were barred from white establishments.
The Ritz Theatre, built in nineteen twenty-nine on Broad Street, was the anchor of that cultural life. Urban renewal projects of the nineteen fifties and sixties demolished much of LaVilla. Interstate construction cut through its streets in ways that the neighborhood never recovered from.
The Ritz Theatre survived, was eventually restored, and today operates as a cultural center. James Weldon Johnson went on to become a novelist, a diplomat, and the executive director of the NAACP. He died when a train struck the car he was in, in Maine, in nineteen thirty-eight.
Lift Every Voice and Sing outlived him by decades and shows no signs of stopping.
