As Black history lessons come under attack, remembering the importance of lifting every voice

Black History Month hit a little bit different this year.

After 12 months in which so much of the conversation about our community has been dominated by discussions about critical race theory, the disproportionate impact of COVID-19, hate crimes, voter suppression efforts, Tyre Nichols, and one police shooting after another, we now find ourselves in the midst of a national debate over the value of teaching Black history at all.

Start with the fact that Black history is American history — if we don’t teach Black history, we are denying this nation a part of itself.

Still, I take so much solace in our successes, in our strength, and in our resilience.

There are many moments from the last year, large and small, that linger for me — two Black quarterbacks, including the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts, facing off against each other in the Super Bowl; a female vice president who is both Black and Asian and a graduate of Howard University presiding over the Senate; the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act making lynching a federal hate crime; and The 1619 Project, a six-part docuseries by the New York Times that reframes the telling of America’s story through the lens of the Black experience.

A cherished memory from this month was when Sheryl Lee Ralph — costar of Abbott Elementary — gazed toward the heavens and sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before the start of the Super Bowl.

Unlike the athletes on the field, Ralph didn’t come to play; she came to slay.

If you watched her performance, then you know what I mean. The Emmy-winning actress — who’s married to State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Phila.) — offered a rendition of what’s come to be known as the Black national anthem that brought tears to my eyes. The song was written for African Americans by an African American to inspire African Americans. It’s about our struggles as a people. It is a canticle of our many triumphs over centuries of adversity.

“Lift every voice and sing/ Till earth and heaven ring/ Ring with the harmonies of liberty. ...”

James Weldon Johnson, a lawyer and the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote the lyrics in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. His brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set it to music. It resonated then and now and is a staple of schools, Black churches, and African American gatherings around the country. I learned it from my schoolteacher parents who grew up singing it in the segregated institutions they attended in the Jim Crow South.

I embraced the song even more while attending Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, D.C. I’ve watched as “Lift Every Voice” has taken on even more meaning in recent years as Black Lives Matter protesters nationwide adopted it during demonstrations in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

It’s equal parts protest song and hymn, and also an ode to hope and faithfulness; “The Star-Spangled Banner” writ in red, black, and green (and without the racist baggage of the national anthem’s problematic third-stanza pro-slavery reference).

“Let our rejoicing rise/ High as the listening skies/ Let it resound loud as the rolling sea ...”

The last several years have been particularly tumultuous for African Americans in our city. Black Philadelphians still suffer from income inequality, with the average Black family’s median household income being $12,215 less than the city’s average, according to the Economy League. The gun violence crisis continues to devastate our community — roughly 80% of the 474 people who were killed with guns in the city last year were Black. And yet our community endures, buoyed by our collective faith — in a higher power, in each other, in our successes, in our strength, and in our resilience — as it did our ancestors for so many generations before us.

“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.”

Our struggle continues. We were reminded of that in January when the Union League chose to honor Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who banned the teaching of Advanced Placement African American Studies in public schools. (When a local Democratic mayoral candidate joined a protest against the league one day and was then spotted at a league cocktail party days later, we received another reminder of just how much clout and influence Black people still don’t have.)

Our community endures, buoyed by our collective faith.

There are still fights yet to be won in those discussions about critical race theory — a graduate-level course that isn’t even taught to elementary and high school students — that has now somehow become code for “anti-white,” the same way that the term woke has been co-opted by right-wingers. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is at the top of the list of states that ban books dealing with race and other topics deemed so-called unsuitable for school kids.

“Facing the rising sun of our new day begun/ Let us march on till victory is won.”

At the Super Bowl, Ralph sang those last lines with a touch of defiance. And so should we all.