Our Other National Anthem
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChYjeuHHDBQ]
The First Missionary Baptist Church Youth Choir begins to line up as the Southern Maryland Community Gospel Choir sing Lift Every Voice and Sing – often called The African-American National Anthem – at the Lexington Park Juneteenth Festival June 18. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) composed the song, and his brother John Rosamond Johnson set it to music in 1900.
- Lift every voice and sing,
- ‘Til 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 ’til victory is won.
- Stony the road we trod,
- Bitter the chast’ning 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 sighed?
- 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,
- ‘Til 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.