When James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote a poem called “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954) set it to music in 1900, they could not have known the spiritual would come to be known as the “Black National Anthem” well into the twenty-first century.

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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization formed by an interracial coalition of people committed to the securing equal rights for African Americans, adopted it as its official song.  Today, it is one of the best-known songs of the Civil Rights Movement.

Watch: Professor Jamel Hudson sings “Lift Every Voice and Sing”