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.
