Ten O'Clock News

[ceeping] [Crowd Singing] Lift every voice and sing till Earth and heaven ring. [Reporter Carmen Fields] The song is known as the Black national anthem. Its words are by the poet, diplomat, Florida's first Black lawyer, and educator, James Weldon Johnson. He lived from 1871 to 1938. As Executive Director of the NAACP, Johnson fought for anti-lynching laws, and as a lyricist, with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, he wrote operas and traveled around the world. When Samuel Allen enrolled in Johnson's creative literature class at Fisk University in the thirties, Celebrity Teacher was how the professor was known. [Samuel Allen] He was a kind of a renaissance man, in a way we don't have today, both as a statesman, a leader,

as a artist, as a writer, we don't have these people now. Maybe the day of the Renaissance Man is over. But Johnson was. He, and then, don't let me forget that he was a diplomat. And was the U.S. Consul, first in Venezuela, and then in Nicaragua, which is interesting today, particularly. For six years, he was in those two countries, and hostilities broke out then, and for a moment, for a short period of time, one moment, he had the U.S. fleet under his control, which of course, was unprecedented. [Carmen Fields] But it is poetry for which James Weldon Johnson may be more commonly known; poetry that captures the religious fervor of Blacks, and enshrines its chief Oracle, the Black preacher. [Samuel Allen] The first poem, 'The Creation,' he had written before, but he added to that the six other

poems, which are, in effect sermons. What he was doing was to put into literary form and to immortalize the Black-- the sermon of the Black preacher. So in 'God's Trombones,' we had-- he says his voice rings like a trombone, that's why he called it 'God's Trombones.' '...and now, Lord, when I've done drunk my last cup of sorrow, when I've been called everything but a child of God, when I'm done travelling up the rough side of the mountain, oh, Mary's baby. When I start down the steep and slippery steps of death, when this old world begins to rock beneath my feet, lower me to mine dusty grave in peace, to wait for that great gettin' up morning. Amen. God stepped out on space, and he looked around, and said, 'I'm lonely.

I'll make me a world.' And, far as the eye of God could see, darkness covered everything, blacker than a hundred midnights down in the cypress swamp. Then God smiles, and the light broke, and the darkness rolled up on one side, and the light stood, shining on the other, and God said 'That's good.'' [Carmen Fields] But in his day, some accused Johnson of hypocrisy and exploitation by using religious themes, because... [Samuel Allen]... he was an Agnostic, he was a nonbeliever. He found he agreed with those thinkers who said life is purposeless. The only purpose here is what we make. [Carmen] But it is 'Lift Every Voice,' that perhaps immortalizes his Johnson most, a rousing anthem that at first was called unpatriotic and divisive, but is now a part of many school choir repertoires and is commonly sung in churches and

predominantly Black social events. The U.S. Post Office stamp, which is to be issued tomorrow, includes some of its notation on the face. That, and the mysterious frowning James Weldon Johnson. [Samuel Allen] ...sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, sing a song for the hope for the present, for the hope that the present has brought us. [Choir singing ] -- of our new day begun. Let us march on till victory is won. [ends singing]