"Lift Every Voice and Sing" — often called "The Negro National Hymn", "The Negro National Anthem", "The Black National Anthem", or "The African-American National Anthem"— is a song written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954) in 1900.
Famous quotes containing the words lift every voice, lift, voice and/or sing:
“Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring,
ring with the harmonies of liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies;
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“No, in country money, the country scale of gain,
The requisite lift of spirit has never been found....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good. They are the works of visionaries and dreamers, but they are realizations of soul, the representations of the ideal. They are grand, beautiful, and true, and they speak with a voice that echoes through the ages. Governments have changed; empires have fallen; nations have passed away; but these mute marbles remain—the oracles of time, the perfection of art.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed.
Girls brought up [as you were,] in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)