Lift Every Voice And Sing Research Articles

Me and Jackie Robinson: Awakenings as a Historian

Me and Jackie Robinson: Awakenings as a Historian Harry Reed Mrs., which we pronounced Miz or even sometimes Miss, Nan Gray my sixth-grade teacher, was quite proud of me. She had mentioned to my mother that I was such a good student that I should think about becoming a doctor. Although I had no interest in being a doctor I went along with the program, which included talking to Miz Gray about coUege, the novels I was reading, and also working at her house, cleaning on Saturday mornings. She later lost her admiration for me because I seemed to be less than enthusiastic about going to coUege. We had a conversation in which she asked me directly for the first time ifI wanted to be a doctor. My answer was no. Before that conversation, however, Jackie Robinson intervened and added to my reputation with Miz Gray. The entire school had been called to a special assembly that morning. Unlike other special assembUes, no one, not even the teachers, knew the subject ofthis special assembly. Our school, New Jersey Avenue School, was an enviable physical plant "for a black school," I had heard adults say. NewJersey's auditorium could seat about 400 people on its main floor and about half that number in its balcony. Mr. T. Montgomery Gregory, the principal, was alone on the stage as we filed in. He waited for us to be quiet and take our seats. Mr. Gregory said that something had happened yesterday that was a first, and a great day in Negro History (both were always capitalized by his generation, even in their speeches). He wondered ifany ofus knew what this momentous event was. There was a pause in the packed auditorium. Almost without thinking I raised my hand. As I remember it, I also raised my entire body out of my chair and waved wüdly No other hand in the auditorium was raised. "That Uttle boy in the back. Ifyou think you know, come on up here" Mr. Gregory said. He seemed to be straining to get a good look at me. 86 FIarry Reed87 My class occupied the seats in the second half ofthe bottom floor under the balcony. Everyone was straining to see who he was talking to, and a buzz started in the room. I heard at least one voice say, "That's Gertie Reed's Uttle brother." At Mr. Gregory's invitation, I bolted down the center aisle. When I got on the stage, I put one arm on the podium, crossed one leg over the other, and smiled at the school. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister, an eighth-grader, sliding down her seat in embarrassment. Later, when she reported the incident to our mother, she said "He was aU dirty and ashy, his shirt wasn't tucked in back, one ofhis socks was down, the leg of one ofhis knickers had faUen, he didn't stand up straight, and was leaning on the podium and grinning Uke a fool." She was partly right; Mr. Gregoryjust let me stand there. He then said "TeU the school what you know." I fairly blurted out "Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a contract to play basebaU for Montreal, the Brooklyn Dodgers farm team!"Through that whole shouted sentence I maintained my grin and my leaning pose. My sister had disappeared into her seat. With that, Mr. Gregory started clapping and of course everybody joined in and almost immediately we were singing, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro National Anthem. When we finished and everybody was seated, Mr. Gregory told me I could go back to my seat. He hadn 't even asked me my name. My fame was fleeting. Not a single kid, not even any ofmy basebaU buddies , said a word about my performance. It wasn't envy, nor was I looking for their praise, we just went back to being Uttle wild boys in sixth grade. But something else happened. Not only did Mrs. Gray talk up coUege even more, but other teachers were talking to me about my studies and my plans. The attention made sense when it came...

Cultural Narratives Passed on: African American Mourning Stories

wo Chicago stories frame this particular passed-on narrative. But that city is representative of other cities and their stories. New York and D.C., Atlanta and Birmingham and even L.A. stories reside as easily within this frame. Whether the stories are fictive or factual, the mourning stories of African American culture form a cultural narrative. These narratives are on in both senses of the expression-they are stories about death, and they are shared within the culture and from generation to generation. It is my argument as well that they constitute a cultural narrative because dimensions of African American ethnicity find a borderlined identity within their urban frames. From the perspective of these stories, a nation's stories are excerpted, a community is demarcated, and in these ways, a culture's identity emerges as malignantly defined through shallow blackface impressions. irony and sorrow of this narrow and negative glimpse at culture is that a community's culture can be isolated and identified through the narrative of its mourning stories, passed on. This essay rehearses some of these twentieth-century narratives as they have appeared in our nation's history and as they have been represented in African American literature. Their coherence is troubling because it constructs the most damaging dimensions of stereotype. Despite the ways in which Ossie Davis's character Reverend Purlie Victorious described the sweetness of blackness as a secret cup of gladness, black memories in African American culture are as painful as they are precious. Certainly, there are sweet black memories-Easter Sunday speeches in black churches, the swell of voices rising together in the Negro National Anthem, braiding a black girl's hair, and the practiced ritual recitation of James Weldon Johnson's The Creation.

James Weldon Johnson's "New York Age" Essays on "The Birth of a Nation" and the "Southern Oligarchy"

In his 1934 pamphlet Americans, What Now?, James Weldon Johnson offered his fellow African Americans an analysis of and recommendations for alleviating the racial problems that plagued them. Focusing at one point on the achievements and duties of the black press, Johnson asserts that African-American editors have a special responsibility to their readership. Black editors, he continues, cannot escape the moral responsibility of the ultimate effect of [their] work on the race, a race which has, as he emphasizes in a later section of the pamphlet, been depicted as a witless darky or a savage brute.1 These pernicious stereotypes, which color, influence, and constitute so large a part of national thinking about African Americans, are circulated throughout the culture by various media-including the relatively new medium of the motion picture (92). Urging black newspaper editors to continue the tradition of placing social responsibility above commercial success, Johnson remarks that he is not an impractical visionary but a former newspaperman who speaks from experience (30). Johnson's achievements as a novelist, poet, and critic have earned him a secure position in the African-American canon. His novel TheAutobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is regarded as a landmark in African-American literature; the song Lift Every Voice and Sing (1900), which he co-wrote with his brother Rosamond, has been honored as the Negro National Anthem; his poetry, critical essays, and editions of spirituals won