Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy

Lift Every Voice: A White Educator Reflects on the Impact of a song honoring Black History.

I was planning on writing a post about the Black National Anthem before I learned of the current controversy about its being sung along with the Star Spangled Banner before today's Super Bowl. I was hoping to post a performance of the song by school students and share a meditation about my memory of hearing it for the first time and the way it became a major source of hope and inspiration for me -- a white Jewish woman teaching in the African American community.

So this is my post and while what I have to say hasn't been affected by the nasty noise in the cybersphere about the song, it does underscore my perspective and what the song came to mean to me while listening to the voices of my students lifted in song.

I first heard this song at my very first "assembly" my first year at Simon Gratz High School. Though I was new to Gratz I was not new to its history. Before being forced transferred there, I had known that it was the first high school in Philadelphia to be racially isolated, with an almost exclusively Black student population as early as the mid Sixties. It was a school where students, under the leadership of principal Marcus Foster ( who would go on to become Superintendent of the Oakland Schools and assassinated by the SLA - the same group that kidnapped Patty Hearst) were proud of their heritage and organized to demand an end to "tracking'," the hiring of more Black teachers and the implementation African American history courses. In 1967, they took their demands to the steps of the Board of Education Building where they were met by busloads of police, ordered by the then Philadelphia police commissioner, Frank Rizzo to "get their black asses!"

White teachers who have been educated in primarily white institutions of higher learning are often not taught very much about the history or culture of oppressed minorities in this country. Thus when we enter schools with the responsibility to teach what Lisa Delpit has called "other people's children" we do not have the knowledge, background nor cultural wisdom to educate those students properly. This was true in the 1970's when I began teaching, and while things got better during the 1990s as the work towards multicultural education and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy became the centerpiece of school reform, with donald trump's second term, we are experiencing a backlash of frightening proportions. And trump and his followers ( or is it trump who is the follower of the racist white nationalists seizing power unlawfully) -- the same people who called progressives "snowflakes" for protesting racist language, images and symbols-- are all bent out of their twisted MAGA shape by a woman singing a song at a football game.

I love this song. It is one of the most beautiful and meaningful songs I have every heard.

Even today, FORTY-FIVE YEARS later, I can still well up with emotion and I can feel the tears start flowing as I hear the first notes of the introduction played triumphantly on the piano, and then after a brief pause, like a collective exhalation, hundreds of young voices joined in song:

Lift ev’ry voice and sing
‘Til 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 ‘til victory is won

I have written often about my experiences of being a young white teacher force transferred by an edict of the Federal government from Harding Junior High ( in a white working class part of the city ) to Simon Gratz High School (in a predominately Black neighborhood. ) For the first six months, I was like Alice through the looking glass; everything was new and strange to me. And while I was frightened at times, ( which I have also written about ) I was also filled with wonder.

My first "assembly" was quite an experience. Hundreds of students poured into the auditorium ( a large grand room with elaborate chandeliers and wooden seats still maintaining some of its grandeur despite years of neglect and ill repair). Everything seemed chaotic to me as I tried to find the rows where my homeroom was supposed to be seated for me to take roll. I found the approximate spot and got a hand from one of my students who helped me take roll. The principal, took to the podium, wearing red and white ( what I learned was a Gratz tradition and whose colors would become a staple of my wardrobe for the next twenty years) as the ROTC students marched in formation with the flag. The students rose, recited the Pledge of Allegiance and then followed with the Star Spangled Banner. I was surprised that all of the students had risen from their seats and most sang along with the pianist and choir director who leading the song. At my predominately white high school and college, we barely sang along.

When the singing stopped, I was about to take my seat, but I noticed that everyone was still standing. That's when I heard the first notes of the Black National Anthem for the first time. The piano introduction swelled and the hundreds of voices which had just finished praising the land of the free and the home of the brave lifted their voices - blending, rising and singing a song I had never heard in my life. I wasn't sure what was happening! I looked around at the other teachers to see how they were reacting. I noticed that all my my Black colleagues were standing tall and singing along with their students. Then I searched the crowd for other white teachers. There were some who were also standing and singing along, others standing but notably silent and a few others sitting in their seats with angry faces. I remained standing, feeling the collective embrace of hope, resilience and victory over racism and despair captured in that song. The students were not just singing disembodied words ( as they had sung the national anthem); they were expressing authentic feeling connected to their historic collective and individual histories.

As the months and years progressed ( I taught at Simon Gratz from 1979 until 1998), I attended many assemblies, sporting events and graduations where Lift Every Voice and Sing would rise from the echoes of the Star Spangled Banner and lift up everyone in the room, including me.

To this day, I cannot hear the Star Spangled Banner sung at a public event without anticipating the swelling up of hope and pride coming after the battle weary national anthem.

Oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave
O're the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

Apparently donald trump is going to be at the Super Bowl later today. The whole country's eyes will be on him. And while the apparent divide will be between those who favor the Chiefs and those who bleed green for the Eagles ( Go Birds!) football fans are not politically homogenous. The NFL ( for the moment) has chosen to showcase a song of celebration of struggle and liberation knowing that the current president is working to destroy those efforts as well as to eradicate the truth about the foundational and institutional role of racism in American history.

I will watch the Super Bowl today. And while I would love for the Eagles to win, I will be watching too for how the fans respond to the performance of this song, as well as the actions of donald trump, who has ascended to power, racism and all, elected by and supported by those people who like some of my white colleagues in 1980 who were undone by a song about Black history and pride.

So yeah. Go Birds! And no one should be surprised when the notorious "boobirds" give trump his due.

found footage - Gratz memories, 1990