By Lee A. Daniels

The verse is more than a century old, and thus, has a slightly archaic tone. But, proclaimed on January 20th boldly and yet simply by the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, it framed the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States with a profound poignancy.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus 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.

So, Rev. Lowery, a lion of the civil rights movement and one of those Americans who live as a conscience of the nation, began his inaugural benediction, closing the official ceremony of oath-taking that installed a black American of mixed heritage – a man born of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya – as the new leader of the free world.

Rev. Lowery made no reference to the fact that that verse is the third and concluding stanza of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also long known as the Negro National Anthem, the 1899 composition by James Weldon Johnson, which his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, later put to music. Rev. Lowery simply stitched those well-loved lyrics into the fabric of the benediction he sent winging its way over the vast throng at the Capitol and the National Mall, to the millions across the globe watching on television and on to the heavens.

But when Rev. Lowery spoke those words, in his slightly gravelly voice – a voice which itself seemed to declare: I have faced evil. I have walked with strong men and women. I have fought for freedom and justice – it seemed that I could hear my foremothers and forefathers singing.

How fitting, I thought, of Lowery’s choice. For no verses better illuminate the indomitable spirit of Americans of African descent and their commitment, despite the most tragic circumstances, to be true to the highest ideals of their native land. James Weldon Johnson wrote “Lift Every Voice” in 1899 – three years after the U.S. Supreme Court validated government-sanctioned racism in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Seventy years later, the legal scholar Charles L. Black described the Court’s ruling as one in which “the curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.” But at the time Plessy gave legal cover to the murderous de jure apartheid in the states of the Old Confederacy, where 90 percent of blacks lived, and the increasingly rapid creation of a de facto apartheid in the North and West.  Black historian Rayford W. Logan would later characterize the decades immediately following Plessy as “the Nadir” – the absolute worst period blacks had ever endured in America. Everywhere within its borders black Americans found themselves marooned in a vast sea of cruelty.

But blacks responded to their internal exile by creating the physical and psychological frameworks that ultimately led to the climactic frontal assaults on Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s. The Great Black Migrations, after Emancipation, the most important event in Black American history, enabled millions of blacks to escape the suffocating South, unleashing that energy for a long, sustained struggle. It’s no accident that those decades saw the creation of a panoply of institutions – the NAACP and the National Urban League; most black fraternities and sororities and many other civic and professional associations – that constituted the bulwark of black America to the present day.

Nor, considered in historical terms, was it an accident that within a decade of Plessy, W.E.B. Du Bois penned the timeless The Souls of Black Folk. His formulation of black double-consciousness gave blacks the means with which to think their way out of one result of their harrowing three-century-long captivity: their crisis of confidence. “One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro,” Du Bois wrote in words that resound to the present day, “ two souls; two thoughts; two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Over time blacks did think their way out, fashioning what Harvard Professor Martin L. Kilson has called the mass “challenge-demeanor” to directly confront white racism. In doing so, they expanded the definition and function of black double-consciousness. Their “second sight” was not only a means of examining their own flaws and capabilities. It soon also became a trenchant device – a combination telescope, stethoscope, compass and gyroscope – for examining the souls of white Americans and the meaning of democracy as they navigated the discordant, wrenching paths of a modernizing America.

From time to time, that growing sense of determination burst forth spectacularly during blacks’ long march to the 1960s, in such events as the disparate black cultural renaissances in Harlem in the 1920s, Chicago in the 1930s and Los Angeles in the 1940s, and in A. Phillip Randolph’s threat at the beginning of World War II to march on Washington unless blacks were significantly included in the military and in the defense industry workforce on the home front.

Just as important, that self-confidence sunk deeply into the lives of ordinary black people. One of them was the young Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., coming of age in the middle decades of the twentieth century in segregated Atlanta, Georgia. Writing in the current issue of Newsweek, Jordan says that while he “was aware at an early age of the injustices” of racism, “I never felt intimidated; I never felt the need to bow to white society’s insistence that I radically limit my aspirations. The reason,” he goes on to say, “is that I was reconciled with the future.”
That reconciliation, Jordan pointedly explains, “was grounded in [black Americans’] certainty of a future in which [they] would live as free men and women – a vision black Americans have carried with them since we landed on the shores of America.”

It is that vision and certainty which suffuses the three stanzas of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is the faith that suffuses those stanzas which was redeemed symbolically and substantively by the election of Barack Obama. And it is the remarkable patience and the patriotism of Americans of African descent that made it possible for Rev, Joseph Lowery to quote the closing words of the Negro National Anthem – May we forever stand. True to our God. True to our native land – and have it sound so right.

Read the complete transcript of Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction.

Lee Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.