Radiolab - The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 6

Episode Date: July 10, 2021

Lift Every Voice.  Black Swan Records was first to record the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. From a family's Thanksgiving dinner, we portal through to the song's past, present, and future. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by Shima Oliaee and Jad Abumrad.  This series was produced in collaboration with author Kiese Laymon, scholar Imani Perry, writer Cord Jefferson, WQXR’s Terrance McKnight, and WNYC's Jami Floyd. Based on the book Black Swan Blues: the Hard Rise and Brutal Fall of America’s First Black Owned Record Label by Paul Slade. Featuring interviews with Pace's descendants and over forty musicians, historians, writers, and musicologists, all of whom grapple with Pace’s enduring legacy. Thank you to young Miles Francis and his family for bringing our Thanksgiving scene to life.  This episode features the book May We Forever Stand written by Imani Perry, all about the Black National Anthem.

Wait, you're listening. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab. From WNYC. From WNYC. From WNYC. From the top. Ready? Yeah. This is the vanishing of Harry Paste and miniseries on Radio Lab.

Chad Abumrod here with... Shima. Alright, what? What? What? What? What? Good. This is the final episode of the series. We told stories about Harry Pace, Black Swan Records, Etha Waters, Rollin' Hayes. We're gonna end the series

with the story of a song. One record. To rule them all. Can you share your name and titles? My name is Yimani Perry. I am the Hughes Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. This story came to us from Yimani Perry. She's heard her throughout the series.

So sweet. Race is not something that is something that happens. I don't know what KSZ is talking about. This looks like a black man to me. I don't know what he's is talking about. This looks like a black man to me. I don't know what he's talking about. Her perspective and work has been a real guide for us. And this story begins one of her books, maybe forever stand.

You shared at the start of your book that your son learned the song and you were surprised. Can you describe your discovery of him during the song? My son was five years old when he came home singing the song. Yeah. She says she came into his room one day. He was sitting on the floor playing with his toys.

And he was humming it. I was like, where did you learn that? And he said, at school, and I said, do you know what it is? And he said, it's a black national anthem. And I was surprised because I just didn't anticipate that he had a great music teacher. I didn't anticipate that they would be teaching the song. And was his school predominantly black or white?

Or was it predominantly white? It's just, you know, kind of progressive liberal private school. But I also knew that he couldn't possibly have understood the full gravitas of the song. I guess in a way this is probably Blatts' one's biggest claim on the historical record. Journalist and author Paul Slade. June 1923. I'm saying. Release, harm, blacks want, I ban, called the man, hadn't harm any for. Actually, on the label, it says Negro National Anthem, or National Negro Anthem.

That is the version that's now actually held in the national recording registry. So clearly very significant. But your son didn't really know what it was at that point. No. But then, I'm on Thanksgiving holiday something happened. So when we went home to Alabama for Thanksgiving, you know, we all come to my grandmother's home.

We're all sitting in the den and I should say my family is very large. My mother is one of 12. All of her siblings have children. We came of age, sleeping many people to a bed. It's a three bedroom house, it's not a big house. So the room is so full, it's sort of like a standing room only. And we gather in the din, which is like the TV room. And this is a common place in Black Southern culture.

You may ask kids to stand up and perform. Do I have to? And so I said, when she she stand up and sing the song. Okay. So he stood up and he lived every voice and sing. Began to sing. When with the harmonies of liberty, the harley joy sings rise high as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. And, um, immediately, my aunts and uncles and my mother, everybody stands up and starts

to sing with him. I think it was my aunt Thalma who was the first one to raise her fist. And then everybody in my family raised their right fist. And his eyes grow, you eyes grow big like saucers, and I moved. It was this sort of moment when he could feel what it meant to say that that song was the Black National. And the reason why

She is wild. It's a good thing. Imani says she looked around the room. My grandmother had recently passed, and I thought her presence is still around. So in some ways we had four generations of black adults singing it together. And that is kind of strange. In that living room, Imani wondered, how is this song speaking so strongly across four generations? And will it continue?

I mean, that's why I had to write maybe for ever stand. You know, it's like, this is something that everybody deserves to know. So, Imani wrote a book, and one of the first things she discovered is that the power of the song, throughout time, you can see the seeds of that in the song's creation story. That story starts with a guy named James Weldon Johnson. James Weldon Johnson. We, to America. Was born? How would you have us? James Weldon Johnson. James Weldon Johnson was born a couple of years after the Civil War.

This is a recording of him reading a poem. And he is extraordinary James was ultimately one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance a novelist a very distinguished poet and an educator so he sounds like one of these like swashbuckling Harry Pacey and kind of do guys like and I can make anything possible kind of Renaissance man of his time absolutely and really and make anything possible, kind of Renaissance man of his time. Absolutely. And really, the context in the post reconstruction,

I mean, well, really, I should say, in the post-slavery context, there was this enthusiasm amongst Black Americans, particularly those who had access to education to build a place in history, to record all that they had achieved because, you know, black people who are people who are seen as not having history, not having any culture of any worth.

So he was among that vanguard that were saying things that we have to record our music, we have to record our sermons, we have to write down everything. So it's 1900. Jacksonville, Florida. James Weldon Johnson is the principal of a school, a school for black children that was set up after the Civil War. And in January of that year, a couple of students come up to him and ask him if he would help them out.

These kids wanted to celebrate Lincoln's birthday, which was the following month, February of 1900. And they asked him if he would write an address for the celebration. So he sits down to compose this poem and something happens in the process and he doesn't fully elaborate this when he remembers it, but he decides not to honor Lincoln. If you could get into his head, what do you think he was thinking at the time?

Okay, so, James is kind of an irreverent person. I'm sure he was one of the people was like, I mean, Lincoln didn't even like black people, right? I mean, I'm sure, right? I mean, I think, you know, and I'm sure he thought, you know, he's the racist and I want to do what it is true. I mean, you have to think about, you know, Jonathan Johnson is comparable to someone like W.E.V. Du Bois. He's like a hardcore intellect. And so, you know, I think he's like, I'm going to say,

who really, the people who really are the heroes in this story? The Civil War wouldn't have been one without black soldiers, right? This is not Lincoln-free displays. It's not that's not the story. No. I'm thinking he's like, I'm gonna tell the real story. So he starts to compose. Lift every voice and sing.

The poem. Till earth and heaven ring. Ring with the harmonies of liberty. Stony the road we trod. Bitter the chastening rod. God of our weary years. God of our silent tears. It's a poem about the past, the present, and the future.

No mention of Lincoln. No. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. The first thing I know of the song is 500 school children. When there was an event at a school, every woman had come. Family, friends. So the whole community comes out, yeah? Oh yeah. Let every sound out as the rolling sea. So they said it to music and the 500 school children sang it.

And Amani says it might have gone nowhere. You know, been just a nice recital. But then a couple months later, something happens that scatters the song far and wide. That's after the break. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. This is Nandorosa from Amsterdam. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred

Peace Loan Foundation and answering public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. Oh, Archie. This is the vanishing of Harry Pace, a miniseries on Radio Lab, where we last left off. James Weldon Johnson writes this song in 1900, 500 kids sing it must have been quite a moment. But after the recital, people generally go on about their lives.

But then something happens in Jacksonville that scatters the song far and wide. Just for context, at this point in history. Jacksonville was, it was not as violent as other parts of the deep south because it was a resort community at the time. People went there to have a nice time and didn't want to experience lynchings and violence

and the like. It was a little bit of this protective bubble where the harshness of the rest of the South didn't really apply. But then in 1901, there's this great fire in Jacksonville that burns a lot of the city. There is a fire that begins at a mattress factory and LaVille Black neighborhood in Jacksonville,

like it's a beautiful neighborhood, it's a relatively prosperous neighborhood. Should I read a portion about James, James, what James says about the fire? She read us from James Weldon Johnson's memoir. We met many people fleeing, James recounted. The fire is traveling directly east over the district where the bulk of Negroes in the western end of the city live. The firemen

spent all their efforts saving a low row of frame houses belonging to a white man named Steve Melton. But the fire chief allowed black owned homes to burn. Essentially the fire department let seven miles of black jox andville burn. After a mere eight hours, 10,000 people were homeless, and 2,368 buildings were gone. Wow. 10,000 people lost their homes because they were just trying to save one white guy's property. Yeah. That's insane.

Oh my God. James reflected on Jacksonville and his youth in some romantic terms. He thought it as this sort of wonderful refuge and is a sort of, I think rude awakening, right? There's no protection. Here's this ever-present immediate possibility that one literally cannot protect oneself against. After the fire, James Olden Johnson and his brother Roseman,

they leave home, heartbroken, go to New York. They start these sort of new lives. And they're not the only ones, so many of the kids that were at that recital, they and their families, they leave too. People are moving out of Jacksonville. So there is this organic spread of the song. Like seeds in the wind.

So now you have all of these kids in all of these new cities, singing the song within their homes, and the mothers pick up on it. Almost immediately, all across the South, black women who are in women's civic organizations, begin to share the song through their organizations. The women's groups and churches, they're pasting, lift their voices and sing in the back of himmels. Letters to editors, articles and newspapers,

they're the ones who say this is an anthem. The first call for it to be the Black National Anthem was 1901, just a few months after that fire. Fast forward to 1919, the NAACP gets involved, and just a few years after that. Harry Pace presses it onto a record. That's also meaningful because the United States doesn't have a national anthem at that point, not until in 1931. Oh wow, so this is like almost 10 years before the US makes it the the star-spangled banner,

the official song. Oh yeah, from that point on. The Black National Anthem. The song went into overdrive. You heard it at civil rights marches. Martin Luther King referenced it before the summer march, after the Montgomery bus boycott. James Brown. He acted into his singing of the national anthem at a Muhammad Ali fight. It keeps coming up again. them at a Muhammad Ali fight. And the home of the brave. It keeps coming up again. The resilience of Lift Every Voice and Sing is truly unparalleled.

Like there are moments when people said, well, here's another anthem of black America. We fell overcome. One nation and we're on the moon. One nation under a groove for it. Oh, it did a black. Young gifted in black. Nina Simone was like, who's my song instead? You know, which as much as I love that song?

No. Lift every voice and sing is, it's the song that was there before the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement and there to turn to after it was done. Why that is, didn't fully click for us until we met up with this guy. Name Emmett G. Price III, Professor of Worship Church and Culture, Gordon Conwell, Theological Seminary. In addition to being a scholar who knows all about Harry Pace and Black Swan, he's also writing a book about Lyft Every Voice.

You deliver sermons here. And he took us to church, his church in Boston. And we sat around the piano and he explained to us while playing, that one of the reasons the song has attached itself to so many different generations. Very different generations is that there's something essential baked into the song's structure and its lyrics. I mean, you know, the first verse

is a articulation of aspiration. Lift every voice and sing. Let's remember that lynching was about muting the voice. Still earth and heaven ring. Right, this notion that this thing is much bigger than us. Ring with the harmonies of liberty. It's supposed to be we the people. Let our rejoicing rise.

Don't sing down. High as the listening skies. Lift the songs up. Let it resound loud as the rolling seas. The seas of the mighty Atlantic Ocean that brought all of us here to the middle passage. So the first chunk of the song captures the spirit of optimism. It's in a major key.

It's about hope rising up. But then... Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Things shift. It becomes minor. Kind of a march almost. And then you go to verse 2, stands 2.

The second verse is a reminder, internal reminder of where we've come from. Stony the road we've brought. Stony rose with bare feet, right? A brutal. Better the chastening rod. Their rod where people were getting beat with, right? The bitter of the steam. Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.

Hope unborn had died. It died a premature death before it even was possible to come be birth. So in the first two verses of the song, you have a kind of juxtaposition between hope and horror. Almost this balanced tension in a way. Hope, horror, hope, horror in a tug of war. And then, now we pray. You get to the resolution.

I mean, the third verse is a prayer. God of our weary years. God of our weary years. God of our silent tears. Thou who has brought us thus far on the way. Thou who has by thy might, let us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray.

Let's start feet. I mean, I think the song it carries you through the range of emotions, right? You said the hope, the achievement, and then the plotting, the struggle, the depth. She says that arc from having hope, to having it crushed, to somehow finding a way forward. The arc is sort of the arc of Black Lives period, you know.

Every generation sort of experiences that arc in one way or another and every individual. She was wherever in the past, we pray. So getting back to the living room, she suspects that as they were all there singing together, everybody in her family was having their own personal flashback. You know, my mother talks about going to the bakery and buying Dale bread, right? She was born in the 40s. And you had to walk through a white neighborhood to do so.

And the second they entered the neighborhood, the residents would stick their dogs on them. So they had to run all the, so the, so the, so they're running through white neighborhoods being chased by dogs. Wow. What about you? What was going through your mind at that moment? I mean, it was a montage of imagery.

I have such distinct memories of being a little girl in Alabama in the 70s and everyone having large afros wearing dashikis that kind of bold assertion of black as beautiful and black pride. But when we moved on the block where we lived, we were the third black family to move on that block. And of course, soon thereafter, there was white flight and the whole block was black except for one older white man on the black, and he would put up a sign that said zoned for whites, because it had originally been zoned for whites. So the boys from the neighborhood would walk by,

kick down the sign on the way to school, and he would put it back up. But there was this choreography. And at the same time, the man who will be the first black mayor, Richard Erington, who is my parents boss at Miles College. The political establishment is shifting, but there's still these horrific episodes of police violence. There's a prison organizing movement happening,

mass incarceration. So in that moment, the kind of fuzzy images of my world, of the 70s and Alabama kind of melded with with the power fist. She says all that was going through her mind as she was looking at her son singing the song. But when we asked her what do you think he was thinking? Okay so this is a great question because as you all know now he doesn't remember that moment and I for me it's an unforgettable moment. I just I'm kind of undone because it wasn't something that he like held onto forever. Here's what we get to an open question. Will the song attach itself to Imani's son's generation?

The same way it did for her and her mothers and her grandmothers and her great-grandmothers. I gave a talk years ago at Stanford and to an African-American studies class, which was largely Black students and none of them knew the song. What do you suppose that is? We don't right as Americans generally like we don't belong to a lot of organizations anymore. We don't have this sort of highly networked daily life. And so you can't find it, right? For lots of 20-year-olds young people, they don't sing it all the time, right? And then there are parts of the country where it never really like

had the same hold anyway. But I do know this, for both of my sons, coming of age in this era has been complicated. They're first sort of... The memory of a president was Obama. Yes, we can, the justice and equality. And the sense of triumph of that moment and then they also lived with constant repetition of video footage of black people being killed by police officers. And because we're in the digital era that it has played over and over again and so often there's no warning so they have seen many black people killed

They've been acute sense of injustice and fear and also the subtle The possibilities are unlimited. In systems that they should feel as though the world is open to them, but they know how profoundly unfair it is. And then they're Trump there. She worries that young people today are being bombarded by messages of extreme hope and extreme despair. And they're left stranded in between without a kind of anchor. In a sense, this is a harder world.

I mean, it's a part of, you know, James Walden Johnson's genius of his composing the song, but like, if we ever needed something like that, Perry's book. On Lift Every Voice, this thing is called May We Forever Stand. stand. And we should say the song is maybe making a comeback? Maybe? Beyoncé did a cover a few years ago, it's getting hacked into the National Anthem again, and it's now being sung at the start of NFL games, which people have mixed feelings about. Understandably. And of course, just last week, Vanessa Williams sang it at the White House. So who knows, maybe it's back for another round. What we do know is that 98 years ago, as Black Swan Records was uploading, Harry Pace seared the song onto a record for the first time,

froze it in place. And that record is now at the National Recording Registry. So, thank you, Harry. The vanishing of Harry Pace was written, produced, and edited by me in Shima Oliai, the awesome audio team, the series is presented as a collaboration between awesome audio, that's osmodio.com, radio lab, and radio diaries. The series is based on the book, Blacks One Blues, The Hard Rise and Brutal Fall of America's first Black-owned record label, Bipolslate.

Our editorial advisors are Kasey Lehman, Imani Perry, Cord Jefferson, and Terence McKnight. Jamie Floyd is our consulting producer. Our fact checker is Natalie Mead. Series Artwork was created by Katia Herrera. A very special thanks to the Frances family, Valerie Badez-Zoei and... I'm Miles and I play Freeman Player.

Perry. Perry. And Miles, thanks also to MacPremon Little Wing Lee. Celia Muller, Sahar Baharlue, Theodore at Couslin, Andrea Latimer, Michelle Zoo, Mike Berry, Maya Pascini-Snow, Rachel Lieberman, and Kim Noake. And we had music and a episode from the Liberty Middle School. Okay, Jad and Shima signing off.

We salute you all. Radio Lab was created by Jad, a boom rod, and is edited by Sorn Wheeler. Lulum Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-host. Suzy Electonberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kiesik, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindoon Yannisambandum, Met Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Sarah Sandbach, Kareen Leone, and Candace Wall.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.