A powerful, deeply moving rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by the Grace Baptist Church Cathedral Choir, under the direction of Derrick James, summons back into focus the once proud, respectable and dignified Black America. The video, originally screened at the historic African-American Church Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC on January 18, 2009, traces the path of sacrifice and struggle from slavery to the civil rights movement, finally, to placing the first African-American into the highest office in this nation. This video recognizes and pays homage to remembering, overcoming, and holding sacred all the many struggles, setbacks, and hardships African-Americans endured to simply be treated human and receive entitlement to their rightful liberties. It conveys our strength and undying determination to persevere despite adversity—from without.
For the past 30 years, the prowess spirit of the “Black America” presented in this video seems to have been replaced or diluted with messages of self-destruction, inferiority, and insignificance mostly due to the creation and acceptability of gangsta rap and its associated lifestyle. This mentality has been perpetuated upon our kind, African Americans, by our kind, African Americans. It’s troubling that a race of people can recognize and dissolve an external enemy, but lack the ability to realize, address, and remove “the inside man”—inferior mentalities and degrading lifestyles—who’s causing the great hemorrhage—the continued demise of the African-American community.
The civil rights movement made race relations in America more diverse and open, but at the same time, more complex and challenging. Because of this, blacks were encouraged to remain united and rise up collectively to defeat oppression of the human spirit. Yet today, rather than serving as a dignified foundation to continually pursue collective advancement, the civil rights struggle is now the memorabilia that crowds the lanes of nostalgia, black lines of enlightenment that lay upon unturned history-book pages, and aging memoirs of former civil rights leaders fading again into blank sheets. Many of the younger generation seem to lack understanding of the power of a true race-progression movement built on dignity, thus, attach no significance to or appreciation of all that was endured, sacrificed, and lost; they just live in the here and now.
Rosa Parks worried and warned that young blacks had absolutely no sense and appreciation of the titanic battles that she and the civil rights leaders waged to make America live up to its much-betrayed promise of justice and equality. In a reflective interview years later, she did not absolve herself and other blacks of her generation of blame for [failing] to pass on the torch. She called for a redoubling of the effort to make young blacks, as she put it, “know what it means to be black in America today.”
Gangsta rap, a benefactor of the struggles of the civil rights movement, does indeed have some misplaced values: lack of respect and appreciation for all of the sacrifices of those before it. Saggin’ pants, the call for misogyny, wanton use of the n-word, glorification of thuggery and a gangsta way of life contrasts sharply with the exemplary, respectable and civil mood of their resilient progenitors. However, after watching the following video, one will realize that it’s not too late to re-light the mighty torch and pass it on. An entire generation of young minds have been mislead and misguided; it’s still enough time to reverse the process of self-destruction and stop the internal bleeding.
View this monumental, prideful, uplifting and true account of our African-American spirit:
H. Lewis Smith is the founder and president of UVCC, the United Voices for a Common Cause, Inc., and author of Bury that Sucka: A Scandalous Love Affair with the N-Word. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP2U0jmZjec
