Our New Day

My city council has four out of seven members newly elected, with all seven members — for the first time in history — women. They're also all under the age of 40, and six of them are women of color. My council member, Mitra Jalali, will become president of the council.

Saint Paul is not the first, but it's the largest city in the U.S. to elect an all-woman city council. It's pretty exciting.

I went to their swearing-in ceremony yesterday. It was great, including one of the most meaningful land acknowledgements I've ever heard. I wish there was a way to link to it.

And after an instrumental rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner," there was a performance of the James Weldon Johnson hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by a singer from one of Saint Paul's Black churches. I'm sure I've heard the song performed before, but her version was singular.

Highlighted against the moment of these women taking office, in the midst of the challenges we face, the words of the first two stanzas of the song brought tears to my eyes:

Lift every voice and sing,
’Til 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.
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;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers died.
We have come, over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
’Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Those words were written in the very late 1890s, just after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and at the beginning of the wave of lynchings that swept America for decades. Hearing it sung, especially as it was yesterday, brings out the meaning. But I hate to admit that it was only now that I finally realized why it's considered the Black National Anthem: Black people in the United States at the time it was written had been through utter hell and could remember it in detail, yet the survivors and descendants still had a commitment to continue and build.

We all share some form of dire threat now, from individual because of who we are to climate change effects, and our only hope is to work together for the future we need.

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An earlier post that included Lift Every Voice and Sing.