All Posts Tagged With: "Black National Anthem"

Something from the southern end of a northbound horse.

Jazz singer Rene Marie saying, as a black, she “just doesn’t feel American.” substituted the so-called “Black National Anthem” sung to the tune of the Star Spangled banner at Denver’s State of the City ceremonies on July 1^st. The Mayor, Council and attendees were stunned by her impudence, and more so when she confessed she’d been secretly planned it for weeks.

The Denver Post reported she had been interviewed by a Russian broadcaster who asked her what it was like to be American. “And I realized I didn’t feel like an American, and that bothered me a great deal,” the singer said. She said she feels like a foreigner sometimes. She also said she did not ask for permission feeling it was her right to artistic expression.

The self-styled “Black National Anthem” was written by James Johnson and first performed more than a century ago. It marked nearly four decades of freedom for blacks in America. It now still appears in some church hymnals as “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” The lyrics of the song are:

Lift ev’ry 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 chastening 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 has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has 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.

The classless stunt has inflamed many provoking harsh criticism and the ire of a broad cross section of people and offers of one-way tickets out of the country for singer Rene Maria. Denver is the site of the Democrat National Convention in August where the first black will likely be the Democrat party nominee for President of the United States, and this incident punctuates a rising sense of racism about the November General election that is already polarized along racial lines.

That STAR-SPANGLED BANNER was written by an amateur poet Francis Scott Key in 1814 as he watched the British Navy bombard Fort McHenry in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. It was originally titled “The Defense of Fort McHenry” and later set to the tune of a popular English drinking song. It became the U. S. national anthem by congressional resolution on March 3, 1931