On Jacksonville, Juneteenth and James Weldon Johnson's Birthday

I wrote this piece this week as part of my subscriber newsletter, but liked it so much, I decided to share publicly.

Around the time I moved to Jacksonville, Florida, Dad introduced me to the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, particularly through his collection God’s Trombones and specifically the poem, The Creation.

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely—
I'll make me a world.

Dad did not know Johnson’s connection to Jacksonville, nor would I for years after. (Mom did! Her elementary school music curriculum in 1990s Florida featured him.) But the poem stuck to me. This recasting of one of my favorite chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1, which fixes all creation into place in a world together, a world full of life and beauty, not marred by war or human caused degradation, converts the vision into a folk tale in Black, southern vernacular:

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Johnson was born in Jacksonville, about two miles from where we now live, in 1871, on June 17. His father was a head waiter at the St. James Hotel, on the site where City Hall now stands. The park next to it was recently renamed to honor Johnson, replacing the name of the Confederate whose statue was removed in 2020. I was honored to stand with other faith leaders in that park in 2018 supporting the Take’Em Down Jax movement, who deserve major credit for raising awareness, demanding change, and creating the urgency to take them down. 

Johnson’s mother, Helen, an Episcopalian by religion, attended a service at St. John’s Cathedral downtown and was asked not to return. She never attended an Episcopalian church again, going on to serve at Ebenezer United Methodist, while his Father, James, served as a pastor at Shiloh Baptist, and his brother, John, later served at Bethel Baptist. Like many predominantly white churches, St. John’s Cathedral has changed courses and repented of its history; today, it held a Juneteenth celebration, with the premiere of a new mass, Voice of my People, by Black composer, Roger Holland. 

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

On June 19, 1865, what had been true in principle since January 1, 1863, became true on the ground in the final state of the Confederacy to come under Union control, Texas. Some 250,000 enslaved people, the Union army announced, were free. The day would come to be commemorated as Juneteenth. For a long time, it was a distinctively Texan celebration, typically observed at churches, before receiving national boosts after the Civil Rights Movement and the 2020 uprising after the murder of George Floyd. Congress and President Joe Biden designated it a federal holiday in 2021.  

This week, many celebrations of Juneteenth will include James Weldon Johnson’s most famous composition, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, a hymn whose lyrics he wrote and for which his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, wrote the music. Written in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, it later was promoted by the NAACP as early as 1917 as a Black national anthem, a status which gained prominent placement on a national scale recently after the 2020 racial justice protests, appearing before football games and other nationally televised events. 

A hymn of soaring hope in the face of the suffering of the past (and present, written as it was during the Jim Crow era), Johnson opens with what may be interpreted as an invitingly universal and yet particular celebration of the thriving of free Black life in the United States:

Lift every voice and sing   
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

To start in joy before moving on to a closer examination of suffering reflects sentiments like that expressed by Sojourner Truth in 1851: “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.” Truth, born enslaved with the name Isabella Bomfree, escaped as a young mother with the help of an abolitionist family, and secured the freedom of her son sold down to Alabama. She adopted her new name in New York City when she felt God’s calling to be a preacher. In the 1840s and 1850s, she became a religious crusader against slavery and for women’s rights, famously asking, “Ain’t I a woman?” All along, her devotion carried her: “Let others say what they will of the efficacy of prayer, I believe in it, and I shall pray. Thank God! Yes, I shall always pray.” 

God of our weary years,   
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might   
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

My daughter participated for the second time this summer in the James Weldon Johnson Young Writer’s Festival in Jacksonville. It is a somewhat religious affair for a public institution, the brainchild of a quintessential Black church lady. I had to admit - as Evangelical classic praise songs go, Awesome God is somewhat translatable to an Interfaith context - God reigns and loves and is wise and powerful, but notably not named beyond those characteristics. I imagine the several hijabi girls in the camp, covering their heads with scarves due to their faith as Muslims, may have been able to identify that God with Allah. 

This year, the end of festival celebration included not just singing Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, but centrally featured a performance of The Creation. The children, from elementary through high school, many Black but also a cross section of Jacksonville’s ethnic and religious diversity, human clay of many colors, recited this vision of a beautiful world and a mighty, mothering love:

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in is his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen.      Amen.