WASHINGTON (RNS) — “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a hymn many African Americans of older generations just know. They’d sung it in church, learned it in school and stood for what is dubbed ...

At age 5, Aquil Sudah first heard the “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” or as he prefers to call it, the Black National Anthem. The hymn, written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by J. Rosamond ...

Andrews, who studies African American and African diasporic music, was one of a dozen speakers at a daylong symposium on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” on Thursday (June 12) at the museum.