Lift Every Voice and Sing
The words came first, and alone, before the music that now carries them. A schoolteacher wrote them for a room full of children, and only later did they travel.[1]
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 chast’ning 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 hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast 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.James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900)
James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871 and died in 1938.[2] He was a writer, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and diplomat, and among the first Black Americans admitted to the Florida bar.[2] He wrote these words in 1900 as a poem, for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday at the segregated school in Jacksonville where he served as principal.[1]
His younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson, set the poem to music soon after, and over the following decades the song spread from Florida through churches and schools across the South.[1] The N.A.A.C.P. adopted it, and it became widely known as a hymn of Black American life, often called the Black national anthem.[3]
Johnson went on to serve as a U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, to lead the N.A.A.C.P., and to edit an influential 1922 anthology of Black American poetry.[2] The poem was first published in 1900 and is in the public domain.[1]
The Cyclops
Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux in 1840 and died in Paris in 1916.[1] He spent much of his career working in charcoal and lithography, in dark monochrome works he called his noirs, and turned decisively to intense color only later in life, in pastel and oil.[1] He is counted among the Symbolist generation, apart from the Impressionists who were his contemporaries.[1]
The subject is drawn from Greek myth, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus watching over the sea-nymph Galatea.[2] The painting has been variously dated, and is generally placed near the end of Redon’s life, around 1914.[2] It entered the collection of Helene Kröller-Müller, one of the first women to assemble a major modern-art collection, and hangs today in the museum that bears her name in the Netherlands.[3]
Amherstia nobilis, from the flora of Java
Berthe Hoola van Nooten was born in Utrecht in 1817 and died in Batavia, in Java, in 1892.[1] She married a Dutch judge and lived for a time in Suriname, where she first collected plants, and after her husband’s death from yellow fever she supported her children by teaching and by drawing, running a girls’ school in Louisiana and Texas before settling in Java.[1]
In Java she made the forty life-size plant studies gathered in her book of Javanese flora, one of the largest botanical works ever printed.[2] The plates were produced as chromolithographs, printed in many colors from a separate stone for each, by the Belgian workshop of Pieter De Pannemaeker.[2] Queen Sophie of the Netherlands lent her patronage, and the work was dedicated to her.[2]
The plate shown is Amherstia nobilis, a flowering tree of Southeast Asia so prized for its pendent red blossoms that it is sometimes called the queen of flowering trees.[3] Despite several editions, Hoola van Nooten died in poverty, and her name survives chiefly through these plates.[2]