Black national anthem performance set before Chiefs-Ravens game, drawing fierce reaction

Tasha Cobbs Leonard to sing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ Coco Jones to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’

By Ryan Gaydos Fox News – Published September 5, 2024 2:58pm ED

Tasha Cobbs Leonard performs on the Vibes Stage on the fourth day of CMA Fest in Nashville, Tenn., Sunday, June 11, 2023. (Denny Simmons / The Tennessean / USA TODAY NETWORK)

This will be my only post on this topic. Tasha did a beautiful job of singing this hymn by James Johnson now called the Black National Anthem. Because black athletes make up 70% of starters on NFL teams, all of our national sprint teams, and 90% of the starters in the NBA – which by the by, according to Left-Lib democrats, makes these institutions ipso facto racists organizations – I guess we can play an anthem that speaks to about 12% of the American population.

But this – as with most racial, democrat ideas and decrees – sets a horrible precedent. The Negro was freed at great cost in white blood and treasure by the Union Army and President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Jim Crow laws founded and enforced by the democrats ended by Republican congressmen passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Trillions of dollars have passed from mostly white taxpayers to mostly black non-taxpayers since then. Only evil white democrats desperately holding onto power and race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton keep this issue alive.

Democrats block every meaningful attempt to free African-American citizens from the welfare plantation they have erected, maintain and protect just like they did slavery. Singing this hymn isn’t going to help that situation one iota.

Very successful charter public schools and parochial private schools have been shown to produce capable and educated black children. Democrats hate these institutions and do everything in their power to shut them down. For shame.

If you really want to lift up black Americans never, ever vote democrat. The racial divide is needed by them to get elected. Vote Republican and save America – all of us.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

By James Weldon Johnson

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.
The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.

Source: Complete Poems (2000)

1 Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
till earth and heaven ring,
ring with the harmonies of liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise
high as the list’ning 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 till victory is won.

2 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 people sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path thro’ the blood of the slaughtered,
out from the gloomy past,
till now we stand at last
where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast.

3 God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
thou who hast brought us thus far on the way,
thou who hast 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