Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

Well, look, we're here to mark Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the emancipation of

enslaved people in this country.

We've done a proper episode on that, by the way, on the roots of Juneteenth.

It was a really good episode, I think. People can go check that out. We put a link to that in the show notes. So we were thinking about other stories that we could tell on this moment, and we figured that on and around this day you might be hearing one particular song a fair amount

lift every voice and sing commonly known as the Black National Anthem.

Lift every voice and sing till earth that heaven be.

meet with the harm on these

of these are with. on these alpity.

Then our rejoicing rise high as the listing

rise high as the listing skies,

then it resound,

as the rolling sea.

Sing the songs. We've gotten a number of requests from folks to do the history of this song and so we figured

this was a pretty good moment to do so.

Lift every voice and sing was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 and then set to music by his brother,

John Johnson, bummer of a name, John Johnson, but in 1905, he adds music to it.

And then in 1919, it was declared the Negro National Anthem by the N-Double-ACP, and

has had this kind of really fascinating life since then with moments

where it feels like it breaks through to larger popularity and then others where it's eclipsed by

other freedom music and black music, but as we'll'll discuss my sense is that as we've

...