NEGRO NATIONAL ANTHEM

NEGRO NATIONAL ANTHEM Written by black poet and former NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), the song Lift Every Voice and Sing has been referred to as the Negro National Anthem and is often sung at the beginning of prayer meetings and other public gatherings:

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 have 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.