There Are A Lot of Black National Anthems, Take Your Pick
Some say Black folks should only sing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Pish tosh! We have a lot of rich themes for Black culture to choose from.
It’s been easy to notice a trending narrative on social media, a place that increasingly brings out some um...characters, in which people who have a problem with Black folks being who we are telling us there “is no Black National Anthem.”
Case in point, not-so-Superman Dean Cain, an actor who convincingly portrayed a racist in the fifth season of “A Different World,” posted on X (formerly Twitter) his sentiments about performances of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” at sporting events.
Cain feels that the only national anthem is “The Star Spangled Banner” and technically that’s true. Congress named it so in 1931, but his sentiment is that us calling Johnson’s song the Black National Anthem is some type of affront, almost as if it should be criminal to have our own cultural POV.
But if you look at it, perhaps to Cain's chagrin, that’s not even the only Black National Anthem. We’ve got tons of them, lots of them written and recorded within living memory.
Our grandparents remember hearing Sam Cooke crooning about the anxiety we felt in the '60s while we watched southern Black children having dogs sicced on them, but still having faith that “A Change is Gonna Come.”
We needed something to help us cast off the stain of self-hatred we’d been taught for years. So James Brown, Soul Brother Number One, for a time shed his processed pompadour in favor of a natural and had us declaring “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
By 1971 Marvin Gaye, inspired by his brother Frankie’s experiences in the Vietnam War, put down his signature track about the confusion caused by the conflict and how that was impacting us and causing us to ask the question “What’s Going On?” The album is still widely regarded as one of the greatest R&B LPs of all time.
Parliament Funkadelic told us that funk smelled good and they were right. There's no limit to the good times we've had behind the genius of George Clinton, Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins and crew. So back in 1978, a decade after Martin Luther King's death, they had us saying we were "One Nation Under a Groove."
In 1979, Gene McFadden and John Whitehead decided to tell us to look up and look forward and frankly, I wish it had come out a century earlier. But given how far we had come, they wanted to deliver an uplifting soul song reflecting the popular 70s sentiment that we’re not where we want to be, but we’re not where we were, so “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.”
There were even what you could call Black international anthems. Bob Marley dropped 1977’s Exodus album and the title track called for a biblical “movement of Jah people” reflecting the rejection of hundreds of years of European colonialism.
Or even Fela Kuti telling the wealthy and powerful that they couldn’t be that way if it weren’t for the people they exploit and subjugate. In other words, “Water, No Get Enemy.”
Hip hop certainly took its turn in 1989 with Public Enemy calling for us to “Fight the Power.” That brought on an entire era in rap music when it was seen as protest music rather than just entertainment.
And a generation later, Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ was the call to action for young Black people angry and frightened over unarmed brothers and sisters being killed wholesale by cops.
All of these have their roots in “We Shall Overcome,” a gospel song of unknown origins that came to be linked with the Civil Rights movement and spoke of a projected time when racial animus disappeared. It was sung by marchers in the south while they bled asking for simple human rights. These things are a petri dish that breeds social protest songs which become anthems.
So it looks like Cain’s need for us to forget about having a Black National Anthem got hit by a dose of kryptonite before he even talked about it. But Black people have always had an interesting history with the anthem that he insists we worship.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” was a poem written by a Maryland lawyer by the name of Francis Scott Key in 1814 after he saw the British attack Baltimore. He owned 175 slaves at the time, and as City Attorney for the then-City of Washington defended the rights of slaveholders in court. Key was later part of an effort to encourage Blacks to leave (and indeed resulted in the founding of Liberia in 1847). So he probably wasn’t thinking about the freedom of Black people, or First Nations people for that matter.
Despite the violent lyrics in the oft-forgotten third verse that depict defeating former slaves who were conscripted into the British military, Black folk have found a way to put our own sauce on it – like we do everything – to make it palatable.
Everyone remembers Marvin Gaye’s performance of the song at the 1982 NBA All-Star Game over a Yamaha drum machine. Maybe the coolest-ever performance of the song, then-Philadelphia 76ers forward Julius “Dr. J” Erving said, “you knew it was history but it was also ‘hood,” later.
And of course, people are still talking about Whitney Houston’s blowout of the song at Super Bowl XXV in 1991, largely seen as the quintessential performance that has yet to be topped. It is seen as probably the most patriotic moment in America since Vietnam, and everybody loved it: white people because they were emotional over the first Gulf War which had started the previous week, and Black people because we were in love with Whitney at the time.
But because our own Black National Anthems were really songs of protest, struggle, or keeping the faith against aggression or oppression, it’s easy to understand our responses to Key’s song when they don’t reflect our sentiment.
Nobody can forget when San Francisco 49’ers Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem in 2016 and instead kneeled when it was played, leading teammates, other athletes, and in some cases entire teams to do the same. It was a gesture that essentially cost him his football career. I hope we all remember what he gave up to open our eyes.
But that doesn’t mean we should forget Johnson’s spiritual ode to faith, resilience, and honor that he penned in 1900 and had his brother John Rosamond Johnson set to music. Once the NAACP adopted the song as a theme and its official song, Black people have been singing it in churches, schools, at events, in homes and debating whether or not it’s necessary to sing just the first verse or all three. It’s almost like the continuing sugar or butter on grits tug of war.
So despite what Cain and a bunch of others who feel that Black people’s first priority is to be non-threatening, it’s okay to regard “Lift Ev’ry Voice,” and all the other songs meant to speak to what you’ve been through over the past half millennium and how strong you’ve been regardless.
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.
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(Note: This entry has been updated.)