MAGA Fans Are Enraged By The Black National Anthem — But They're Missing This Glaring Point

Yahoo

11-02-2025

Grammy award-winning singer Ledisi, a New Orleans native, delivered a powerful rendition of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' — widely known as the Black national anthem — during the pregame ceremony at Super Bowl LIX in her hometown on Sunday.
And some right-wingers were outraged about the song — but their arguments missed the point.
Conservatives on social mediacharged this week that 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' is divisive and that the pregame performance, which also featured a choir of 125 high school students from the Greater New Orleans High School Chorale Collective, promoted the idea of 'segregation.'
Prominent right-wingers similarly complained about the popular hymn's inclusion in professional athletic events last year. The NFL began featuring performances of the historic song at Super Bowl pregame ceremonies in 2021.
Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly griped about the Black national anthem being played at the 2024 Super Bowl, writing on X at the time: 'The so-called Black National Anthem does not belong at the Super Bowl. We already have a National Anthem and it includes EVERYONE.'
But 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' is not about division — it's about recognizing the suffering and hurdles Black people have faced in America as well as the hope for a better future.
'Black communities across the globe continue to be vulnerable in very unique and unsettling ways,' Shana Redmond, an author and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies music, race and politics, told NPR in 2018. 'To sing this song is to revive that past — but also to recognize, as the lyrics of the song reveal, that there is a hopeful future that might come of it.'
Redmond later added that the U.S. national anthem, 'The Star Spangled Banner,' was 'missing a radical history of inclusion, was missing an investment in radical visions of the future of equality, of parity.'
''Lift Every Voice and Sing' became a counterpoint to those types of absences and elisions,' she said. (The California NAACP called for a new anthem in 2017, calling certain lyrics of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' — written in 1814 long before the song became the national anthem — racist and anti-Black.)
Gerald Early, professor of African and African-American Studies and English at Washington University in St. Louis, told NBC News this week that the performance of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' should be 'framed to the public not as a protest song but as a song of Black affirmation, perseverance and inspiration.'
'It is unfortunate that the song's performance has become a culture war issue,' he said.
The Black national anthem wasn't the only part of this year's Super Bowl to spur culture wars on social media. Right-wingers were similarly outraged by Kendrick Lamar's halftime show, which highlighted Black cultures and experiences and featured Black dancers and other Black stars, such as singer SZA, tennis legend Serena Williams and veteran actor Samuel L. Jackson.
Some naysayers labeled the show a 'DEI halftime show,' which many on X interpreted as a clear dog whistle for criticizing the show's celebration of Blackness.
Attacks on Black and other cultural celebrations and traditions have ramped up since Donald Trump took office last month. The Defense Department announced in a memo last month that it would no longer mark cultural awareness months such as Black History Month following Trump's string of executive actions attacking diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
'Efforts to divide the force – to put one group ahead of another – erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution,' the agency wrote in its memo.
But reflecting on Black history shouldn't be viewed as divisive; it's 'essential,' Erica Foldy, associate professor of public and nonprofit management at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, previously told HuffPost.
'For centuries, Black history was erased,' she said, later adding, 'Black History Month raised the visibility of Black history — about slavery and Jim Crow but also about the essential role of Black people in creating the U.S. we know today.'
'It is essential that these topics remain squarely on the agenda — otherwise, they will go back to being erased,' she added.
And with the Black national anthem in the news this week, it's important to remember how the inspirational song was born.
'Lift Every Voice and Sing' was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson, a principal and lawyer, who was the first Black American to pass the bar in Florida. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson, composed the music for the song, which was first performed publicly by children at a school celebration in 1900, according to the Library of Congress.
'Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us / Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,' a portion of the lyrics read.
'The dialectic of hope and agony presented so memorably in this song remains central to the African American experience today,' historian Burton W. Peretti wrote in a 2016 essay about the song featured on the Library of Congress website.
The NAACP adopted the hymn as the Black national anthem in 1919 — years before the 'Star Spangled Banner' became the official national anthem of the U.S. in 1931.
The song was 'prominently used as a rallying cry during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,' the NAACP's website states.
'Lift Every Voice and Sing' is often sung at churches, schools and historically Black colleges and universities, and it has had several landmark performances over the years. Beyoncé memorably belted out a rendition during her history-making 2018 performance at Coachella, in which she became the first Black woman to headline the festival.
She wrote in an essay for Vogue that year that performing the song was 'one of the most rewarding parts of the show.'
'I know that most of the young people on the stage and in the audience did not know the history of the Black national anthem before Coachella,' she wrote. 'But they understood the feeling it gave them.'
When asked about the controversy surrounding the song's place at the Super Bowl, Ledisi told CNN ahead of her performance that the song, and music overall, is a part of 'American culture.'
'Whether some believe it or not, it's part of our history,' she said, adding that she was honored to help 'remind us all why music is a beautiful language for us to come together.'
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