Lift Every Voice and Sing

In honor of Martin Luther King, jr., whose birthday we celebrate today, here is the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”:

I’ve long loved this hymn and wished that it might find a place in Mormonism. There’s a risk, though, that, drawing on resonances with the Mormon pioneer story (for instance), we might simply appropriate it into a narrative and culture that strongly tilt white.

But maybe that white tilt is exactly why Mormons need to sing this hymn: to open our hearts to a new perspective on this history in which we, after all, played a part. The spirit of Elijah comes to turn our hearts to our fathers and our mothers; perhaps singing this hymn could lead us to count among our fathers and mothers people who were “despised and rejected of men,” considered less than human, less than fully valiant, and unworthy of priesthood or temple blessings—including by us. We cannot be saved without them: not until we learn to see God in the faces of black women and men, and learn to see in ourselves the Gentile nations who inflicted suffering on the very Israel God sent to save them. We cannot be saved until we join in their song instead of waiting for them to join in ours.

—

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 died?
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 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.