William Gattis - Lift Every Voice and Sing (clip)
Interviewed on March 26, 2025
William Gattis (WG): If you really want to know Black history, take the time to sometime read “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Around 1910 it was written for children to tell them about their history. And if you go line for line, you will read about the struggle and I’m often surprised that even now we… if I had to start and I was teaching a history class, English class or whatever in the schools, and I wanted kids, all children to know about the history of people of color here, that’s where I would start because you can take each one of those paragraphs of lines and then go back and read the history that surrounded it. When you see a line like, “We have come over the way, treading our path to the tears, and the blood of the slaughtered.” That’s our history and if you can get in the mindset where you actually are seeing that then you can get to the last line where it says, “we will march on because we lift every voice and sing.” Not just people of color but say all that can see, that eyes can see and ears can hear, that this is a history that was affected by people but the brunt of that history was people of color. Why? Because we elevated ourselves to a level of being prideful that we were greater than anybody else and that’s how you get people relegated to these little areas saying well, “You don’t deserve to be part of this enlightenment.” And you aren’t taught to read and write. Why? Because it opens the doors but the whole point of the matter of what I’m trying to say is the history is right there but I don’t know how many people have actually sang that song or read the words but for every Thursday in Assembly we stood and now people sing the song and they are sitting and you say “What?” And that to me tells me right away, not only do you not know about the history, but you don’t know what is behind it and why we stand. And you see people saying, “Should I stand or should I sit?” And we sit among the sisters and brothers and say, “What? What happened?” Because we all stood because we knew it was part of our culture but now, like you referred to, something being glossed over. How do you gloss over “Lift Every Voice and Sing?” with conscience if you want to be part of the African American experience and to elevate people to a level that is honest and true to who they are as a people, as a culture, as a force to be reckoned with. Sorry y’all. I got…
Various Group Members: No, thank you so much. This is…. We’re not gonna shut you down. Just know that.
