"Lift every voice and sing"

I’m sad about The Great American State Fair.

It’s a bust, so far.

It was supposed to be something special, the centerpiece public “expo” of America’s 250th birthday: A free, 16-day national exposition on the National Mall, with pavilions and programming from all 56 US states and territories, plus music, rides, cultural exhibits, military elements, movie screenings, flyovers, and a Ferris wheel. All of it to celebrate the people, traditions, innovations, and spirit of our beloved country.

That sounds awesome.

I mentioned to Johanna a couple of weeks back that I wanted to go, and asked if she did.

“No. Not if it’s going to be all about him.”

It seems a lot of people feel the same way. This photo was taken on the third day of The Great American State Fair:

What a shame.

A celebration of states, food traditions, crafts, music, agriculture, invention, regional pride, and public memory. But the branding, the kickoff rally, especially Trump’s speech (a few scripted paragraphs of patriotic boilerplate, the rest just “Me, me, me, me, me”), the Trump-centered monuments and MAHA programming, the atmosphere soaked in donor privilege and partisan politics, the performers withdrawing, the states opting-out, and the predictable lies about crowd-size all turned what could have been a shared civic ritual into something many Americans correctly read as a Trump spectacle, just as Johanna predicted.

Maybe it will turn around. Maybe the crowds will come. Maybe the meaning of our national holiday will shine through the MAGA dross. Maybe the president will make it less about himself, more about us.

And maybe, as the Irish say, it will rain beer.

The deepest problem isn’t Trump, though he fuels it. The real issue, and tragedy, is that too many Americans feel we don’t share the same country any more, the same culture, the same history, even. And they’re done debating the question.

The sharp edge of MAGA claims the country for themselves and themselves alone. It’s their country. Trump has liberated many of these followers into an assertion of the power to decide who is a “real American,” and who isn’t. And his administration is using the apparatus of the national government to establish that claim as law.

Recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants. Devout Christians and proud atheists, Muslims and Jews and so many more. Black and White Americans and those of all the various, glorious shades our people come in. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Green voters and—yes—Socialists, the whole political spectrum. Trans people. The imprisoned. “Anchor babies.” The disabled.

You aren’t more American, or more of a “real American,” because of who you’re great-great-great granddaddy was, or how much money you’ve got, or what your politics are.

Goodness gracious, that is the whole point of the place! That is precisely what we celebrate on the Fourth of July, the world-changing promise and pledge that we made to ourselves and to all peoples for all time, the promise we still struggle to fulfill in a national journey unlike any other in human history:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

That audacious declaration, and the continuing work we must do to make it real, is worthy of a truly splendid celebration after 250 years.

And we will, in our own ways, our own towns, our own families.

And our own newsletters and websites.

So I thought The Sunday Poem can be part of that, too. Over the next three weeks (a 250th birthday deserves a season of observances), we’ll have a poem that touches on the great principles of our nation: Equality, Liberty, Indivisibility.

We have fought for each of those American ideals down through the generations; we must still fight. And perhaps a poem that reflects upon some aspect of the power of those principles can help, in a small way, to commemorate what our ancestors did to bring us this far, and inspire us to carry on the work.

We begin with equality, as the Declaration does.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is sometimes called the Black National Anthem. It is also a magnificent lyric set to stirring music, the words written by James Weldon Johnson and the melody by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson. Their stories and achievements are remarkable; it’s worth looking them up.

I’d only note how strong in hope these words are, hope that our country can fulfill that 250-year-old promise. As I read them, I was once again grateful for the long and terrible struggle of Black Americans, whose work in our country’s history was memorably described by historian Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project:

“Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

James Weldon Johnson himself describes how this song came to be.

—Terry

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.

Lift every voice and sing   

Till 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 till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chastening 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,   

Till 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 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.