The Song That Left Without Him

A Poetry Tale about James Weldon Johnson, told by Hello Doggo.

In nineteen hundred, James Weldon Johnson, head teacher of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, was down to give an address on Lincoln’s birthday, and wanted a poem as well.

He tried. He couldn’t do it. Decades later he admitted his poem on Lincoln was still to be written.

What he wrote instead was a song. His brother Rosamond set it to music, and on the twelfth of February, nineteen hundred, five hundred schoolchildren sang it for the first time.

Lift Every Voice and Sing.

Johnson remembered pacing up and down the porch as he finished it. He could not keep back the tears, he wrote, and made no effort to do so.

And then, the extraordinary bit. The brothers went off to New York to write for the stage. And, in Johnson’s words, the song passed out of our minds.

The children didn’t forget.

They kept singing it. They took it to other schools. Some became teachers, and taught it to their own pupils. Within twenty years it was being sung across the South, and the N double A C P had taken it up as the Negro National Anthem.

By then Johnson was working for the N double A C P, and would soon be running it. The song he’d forgotten had come back and found him at the office.

In The Gift to Sing, he wrote that he had a magic way to turn the gloom to cheerful day.

It turns out the magic didn’t need him. It needed five hundred children with good memories.