Soundtrack for Black History: 12 months a year

You're writing about the NFL pre-game?!

It’s weird to find myself writing about anything even remotely related to sports. When casual conversation turns to the Orioles or the Ravens, I usually remind my friends that I divorced sports when my first marriage ended. But as Black History Month draws to a close, I’ve been following reactions to the inclusion of Lift Every Voice and Sing – the “Black National Anthem” in the Super Bowl LVII Pregame show.

In 1899 poet and activist James Weldon Johnson composed the lyrics (and his brother John the music) to be performed the following year at a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It was debuted by a chorus of 500 Black children, and spread by word of mouth. He called it “National Hymn.” We’re talking about a time period when the gains of post-Civil War Reconstruction were gutted by the spread of Jim Crow. The NAACP began calling the piece a “Negro National Anthem” in 1917. Just a year before that,  President Woodrow Wilson – who also introduced segregation into the Federal government – signed an executive order making the Star-Spangled Banner “our” national anthem.

The NFL began playing the song before its games in the 2020 season after the months of protests following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police.

Take in the lyrics...

…while noting that the Superbowl versions feature only the first verse. (Much as we are offered only the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner. See Go Deeper for more):

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.

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 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.

Copy this into your browser: YouTube Lift Every Voice and Sing

Click on the links you are drawn to.

To my Black and Brown readers, if your favorite isn’t here, please take a moment and send me the link!

To my white readers: take a musical browse break. Find a version that touches you. Bookmark that link. Adopt it as your personal go-to Soundtrack any time you find yourself 1) brought up short by media, and/or your own your own racialized response to breaking news, or to an interaction with a colleague or a friend 2) wanting to recognize, honor, celebrate a liberating moment of Black and Brown Renaissance, personhood, culture, creative genius, perseverance.

Music has the power to open us up to transformative learning.

No matter whether we take this as a hymn or an anthem: we know the proper response is to stand. To stand up. To stand with. To stand up for.  This hymn invites us – all of us –  to stand and honor the dignity, the history, and the hopeful future of Black and Brown people in our nation.

My favorites:

Alicia Keys’ pre-recorded video for the Super Bowl LV. Remember  this is recorded a few months after George Floyd’s murder and in the first year year of the Pandemic. Look carefully for the masks and t-shirts that Say Their Names.

The Chicago Children’s Choir,  where all three verses are sung. Recorded for their 2022 Black History Month Concert, one of the most breathtaking of Covid-times Zoom videos – how some 288 kids united in voice in their physical isolation.

Go Deeper

Consider the implications of this excerpt from Verse 3 of the Star-Spangled Banner. Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics during a young America’s 1814 war with the British. It was adopted as our National Anthem in 1931,  when the country was suffering the  effects of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. And the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Make history…reshape, re-form, your own racialized history…

You don’t have to lay down this path alone.

Gather a group of 6-12 friends, colleagues, who share your desire and readiness. We can begin to imagine and create a world where racial healing is an ongoing feature of our personal lives and the world.

Pick my brain for 30 minutes about –

a 2-hour practice-based format for working with our own lived experiences and racialized origin stories

A 4-hour practice-based retreat encounter with our personal and national history, the American Dream, and American Citizenship.

For those embedded in a family, community, or workplace challenged by today’s controversies and conflicts, I offer a bundle of six 1/1 sessions of support for personal inquiry, skill-building, and transformation to negotiate the rough waters of your racialized and gendered life.

Let’s take these illuminating and strengthening steps together.

Black History Month for White People: a Photo-Essay

Black History Month for White People: a Photo-Essay

Just a year ago I was preparing for a half-day online offering, digging back into a trove of photos from my first trip to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in 2016. One photo captured this interpretative text:                                                    “Cowrie shells, manillas, beads and guns changed hands in exchange for African men, women, and children.”

I looked up this one word…Manillas

and it opened up  a visual…and then visceral understanding of a slice of Black – and White – history that I share with you here.

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/manilla-the-money-used-during-the-slave-trade-in-west-africa. Accessed 11/15/21

Manillas: in the 1400s, variants of these metal bracelets or armlets were 

the most common form of “barter coinage” – aka money –  in Africa, 

and especially along the West African coast. 

They were highly portable,  

and usually worn by a woman to display her husband’s wealth. 

Their value was partly based on the sound made when they were struck. 

Manillas were the coinage of the African peoples – their tangible wealth, and their power,

 including their power of self-determination.

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/manilla-the-money-used-during-the-slave-trade-in-west-africa. Accessed 11/15/21

Photo Credit: Scott Semans

Manillas began to transform

In the 1470s Portuguese explorers became aware of the use of these “red gold”/copper bracelets – 

that had been mined and traded across the Sahara by Italian and Arab merchants long before the Portuguese arrival.

They contracted with manufacturers in Antwerp to produce these bracelet-like forms in a wide range of designs, sizes, and weights.

The British, French and Dutch followed suit. 

Bristol, as a copper manufacturing center, and then Birmingham as a brass center, developed in response.

Manillas became slave trade money.  

By 1505, a slave could be bought for 8-10 manillas,

and an elephant’s tooth for one copper manilla in Calabar, the chief city of the ancient Nigerian coastal kingdom of that name. 

(National Museum of African American History and Culture – personal photo, 2016)

“The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration of people in world history.”

“The transatlantic slave trade grew as Europeans developed a new system of forced labor in the Americas. Cowrie shells, manillas, beads and guns changed hands in exchange for African men, women, and children.”

(Interpretive material from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC)

(National Museum of African American History and Culture – personal photo, 2016FrAn enslaved child’s manacles

From the shape of freedom and self-determination to the shape of enslavement

Manacles sized for a child

“Enslavement of Africans was a long process that began at the moment of capture 

and extended through a series of ordeals leading to the plantation fields or some other forced service.”

(Interpretive material from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC)

https://abagond.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/history-of-africa2.gif

“In the 1400s Africans did not see themselves as African. The continent included many city-and-nation-states and, like Europe, it was made up of diverse societies. The people of one region might have little in common with their neighbors. The majority of enslaved Africans came from the western coast. These regions were known for their centers of learning, military prowess, vast empires, and diverse faiths. They traded with societies as far away as Asia and Europe.” [Interpretive material from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC]

Take a few moments to locate on the map the identities of the various “states” that are coded by color…the locations of natural resources – salt, gold, copper, ivory in black, and the various ethnic areas in red, and the land-trade routes in pink that run north and south.

I  remain stunned awake as I sit with this map and recall how I was taught about Africa: a dark undifferentiated continent. I was taught nothing of its history, knowledge, or cultures. Just undifferentiated Blackness, like the lens that I still must peer through when I see an unknown Black face in order to be able to see the individual human, not just a Black body, standing before me.

These symbols originated with the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana, a main departure point for slave ships – and  “convey knowledge, wisdom, and culture…Often seen on textiles, the symbols together tell a story. Throughout the African diaspora, objects made by enslaved people demonstrate the continuity of African knowledge and culture.”

[Interpretive material from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC]

Black – and White – history
as we continue to make it in the 21st Century

CBS News reports on the handcuffing of a 5-year-old Montgomery County, Maryland child

Roughly 39 minutes into this January, 2020 video, an officer briefly handcuffs the child, and can be heard to say:   

“You know what these are? These are hand-cuffs. These are for a person that don’t wanna listen and don’t know how to act.”

The handcuffing happened after the child’s mom arrived and he had calmed down. 

This Black History Month, let us White folks
commit to “return and get it.”
“Get” our single, shared, American history. Understand the blatant and subtle continuities
with the original sin that is slavery.
Make a way where there has been no way –
in ourselves, our neighborhoods, our places of worship,
our businesses, our institutions –
to racial reconciliation, restitution, peace,
and harmony after strife.

Dig deeper: two Black people making recent history

You have heard of Colin Kaepernick, and the price he paid for kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. You may not have heard (as I had not) of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who was suspended, then banished from the NBA in 1996.

And a couple of days ago, Google’s Doodle intoduced me to Mama Cax,  an American-Haitian model who walked the runway “showcasing her prosthetic leg,” challenging a whole bagful of “beauty atandards” as she did.

Make history…reshape, re-form, your own racialized history…walk a different future: lay down a fresh path walking

You don’t have to lay down this path alone.

Gather a group of 6-12 friends, colleagues, who share your desire and readiness. We can begin to imagine and create a world where racial healing is an ongoing feature of our personal lives and the world.

Pick my brain for 30 minutes about

    • a 2-hour practice-based format for working with our own lived experiences and racialized origin stories

    • A 4-hour practice-based retreat encounter with our personal and national history, the American Dream, and American Citizenship.

For those embedded in a family, community, or workplace challenged by today’s controversies and conflicts, I offer a bundle of six 1/1 sessions of support for personal inquiry, skill-building, and transformation to negotiate the rough waters of your racialized and gendered life.

Let’s take these illuminating and strengthening steps together.