she's baaaack

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a song many African-Americans know from school or church. But if you didn’t hear it there, you may know it from one of a few landmark performances.

Motown’s Kim Weston sang it to nearly 100,000 people at the historic Wattstax concert in 1972. In 1990, singer Melba Moore released an all-star version that included Anita Baker, Stevie Wonder and Dionne Warwick. Gladys Knight and Bebe Winans added their own rendition in 2012. And this April, Beyonce sang it at Coachella, highlighting black culture to a largely white audience.

So what is it about “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that speaks to a people, so much that it’s become known as the “black national anthem”?

Shana Redmond, a professor at UCLA who studies music, race, and politics and author of the book Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, says it’s a song about transcending difficulties — and those difficulties have never fully receded.

“Black communities across the globe continue to be vulnerable in very unique and unsettling ways,” Redmond says. “To sing this song is to revive that past — but also to recognize, as the lyrics of the song reveal, that there is a hopeful future that might come of it.”

Till Victory Is Won: The Staying Power Of ‘Lift Every Voice And Sing’