The Black National Anthem — “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — is a hymn written as a poem by then-NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) in 1900. His brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873 ...

A stirring monument in words and music, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” reminds Americans to press on to the “more perfect union” that the U.S. Constitution’s preamble envisioned.

From its beginnings as a birthday tribute to Abraham Lincoln sung in 1900 by 500 black schoolchildren in segregated Florida, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has evolved into the unofficial black ...