Many black viewers reacting to the performance on Twitter agreed, calling her performance a “call to action.” Some said “Lift Every Voice and Sing” brought them to tears, bringing back memories of singing the hymn at church or elementary school as young children. “To have someone on the scale of Beyoncé in a space like Coachella, is really a departure,” Redmond, an associate professor of musicology and African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, said in an interview with The Washington Post. The inclusion of the turn-of-the-century hymn was notable not only because of size of the audience but also because of the setting - a mainstream festival that is known for being attended predominantly by white people. Her entire set - complete with a drum line, step dancing and musicians in berets - was an ode to black culture and historically black colleges.īut arguably the most significant moment in her show - politically and historically - was her rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” as it is also called, just before transitioning to “Formation.” Beyoncé became the first black woman to headline the Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif. In a performance in front of tens of thousands of people, one of America’s biggest pop stars paid homage to the song by singing a few of its lines. For generations to come, it would be known widely as the “black national anthem.” Within 20 years, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People adopted “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” as its official song.

The song quickly took off, becoming a rallying cry for black communities in the South, or as one observer noted at the time, “a collective prayer.” The following year, a chorus of 500 school children performed the song at the Lincoln celebration. “I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so,” Johnson recounted. As he wrote the words, evoking the struggle and resilience of his ancestors, he began to weep. He paced back and forth on his front porch, agonizing over the lines of the poem.Īfter finishing each stanza, he handed over the lyrics to his classically trained brother, John Rosamond Johnson, who put the words to music.

He began with a simple but powerful line, a call to action: “Lift ev’ry voice and sing.” Instead of preparing an ordinary speech, Johnson decided to write a poem. Just two decades had passed since the Reconstruction era, and lynchings were on the rise in the segregated South. In 1899, a young poet and school principal named James Weldon Johnson was asked to address a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., for the coming anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

Lift every voice and sing juneteenth