Lift Every Voice

Reflections on James Weldon Johnson’s hymn and today's America

James Weldon Johnson’s cabin in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Image by The Berkshire Edge

James Weldon Johnson’s hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” presents a remarkable perspective on the relationship between the individual and the collective. Many of us cannot imagine what a fertile relationship between the two might look like in a toxic culture poisoned, on the one hand, by libertine narcissism and, on the other, its symbiotic inverse of authoritarian groupthink.

American individualism promotes the solo voice, isolated from whence it came. This is exemplified by the celebrity pop star driven to insanity by adoring fans, forever obsessed, yet paradoxically alienated from their object of adoration. Opponents of the solo voice propose, as an alternative, the mass voice. Here, the individual voice is hidden in the voice of the collective, epitomized by the communist chorus that stands above every individual singer. Members of this mass choir find temporary relief from the cult of self that permeates American culture but, in the process, cede one of the greatest human responsibilities: to think for oneself.

It is only the Black American call to lift every voice—a call that each American has heard whether or not he or she acknowledges it—that promises an entirely different relationship between individual and collective. Every voice must be lifted, not just the chosen few elevated to stardom in the entertainment industry, university system, business world, or the rest of the bloated professional-managerial class whose members fashion themselves as a new elect swimming in a sea of the reprobate. Every voice must be lifted, as well, not to cover each other up in the deafening chorus of a unison mass voice, but, rather, to honor and realize the potential in the irreducible individuality of each human being. Donny Hathaway’s 1971 Live recording, his interaction with the band and audience, is what it sounds like to lift every voice.  

To lift every voice is to reckon with the reality of human genius.

In America, such an insight could, I think, only have come from a people who have experienced the horrors and indignities of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. When every dream is deferred, every human being could be remarkable, could be extraordinary, and no one would know. Behind the call to lift every voice lies the assumption that every man and woman, every boy and girl, could be a genius.

A genius, here, is not someone who stands above the people as an exception to the rule of human mediocrity, stupidity, and failure. Rather, genius is a quality that lies in each and every person. Any form of oppression that forecloses on the individual expression of genius in the name of collective definitions of superiority and inferiority can only be called a tragedy.

To lift every voice is to accept the risk of human unpredictability.

Unpredictability presents a danger to those who value social order and harmony above all else, but it is only by facing and accepting this danger that creativity is possible. If everything were determined, set in stone, amenable to management, predictable, then creativity would be impossible.

To lift every voice means, necessarily, to accept the inherent unpredictability and, thus, potentiality, of each human individual. None of us knows what will transpire when every voice is lifted, but to fail to lift every voice would itself be a moral crime against the future, against another world that we cannot yet imagine without the assistance of every voice.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a collective affirmation of the sanctity and potentiality of each individual. It reminds us that only when we conceive of a world grounded in reverence for every human being can we forge a collective life worth living.