Lift Every Voice and Sing

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson is a hymn and an anthem addressed to Black Americans during the difficult years of Post-Reconstruction. Johnson relies on the first-person-plural point of view, varying diction and imagery to encourage listeners to be active and steadfast participants in the struggle to secure their freedom.

In the first stanza, Johnson relies on diction and imagery to reframe how the speaker and audience see Black history during the present, difficult moment of the poem. Through word choices like “Lift” (Line 1), “heaven” (Line 2), “rise” (Line 3), and “High” (Line 5), Johnson creates a mood of upward momentum and optimism. Many of the lines in this first stanza are designed to get the audience to see itself as capable of action. “Lift” (Line 1), “Let” (Lines 4, 6, and 10), “Sing” (Lines 7 and 8) are imperatives—verbs that command—that are all about action by the speaker and their audience.

In the first stanza, Johnson also uses visual and auditory imagery that encourages the audience to see the present moment as a victorious one. The speaker acknowledges but does not yet dwell on the “dark past” (Line 7) of enslavement and racial terror after Reconstruction.