Washington, D.C. — God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way . . .
Many people will instantly recognize these words: they are lines from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the poem and hymn otherwise known as the beloved Black National Anthem. It’s a hymn that speaks of the long, difficult road we have already traveled – and the ongoing determination, through blood, stunted hopes, exhaustion, and tears, to keep hope anyway, keep faith, keep marching, and keep rising.
This is a moment when many people are feeling as if the dream they have of what America can and should be has been deferred yet again, while the forces that seem willing to ignore, excuse, or embrace misogyny, racism, bigotry, bullying, and cruelty may appear to be ascendant. But we have come much too far on the way already to believe the road ends here.
There are millions of people in our nation still standing up to say “this is not who we are.” There are others who understand that phrase with a special emphasis: this is not who we are. At every step since its founding, whenever America has shown it has room for exclusion and hate, there have been people who were painfully aware that may indeed be who America is – but who never stopped believing and insisting America could and must be better. Many of us stand on the shoulders of generations of these people. They include elders and ancestors who knew they deserved dignity and the equality promised in the Constitution even if they lived and died without seeing that come to pass. They are all among the countless Americans who again and again have found ways to push America forward and closer towards its professed ideals. Many of our ancestors also knew far too well that any steps of progress might be followed by backwards retrenchment, yet they were never deterred. They kept going.
Remember what Frederick Douglass said in 1857: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
The struggle between power for some and freedom for all will continue, but the struggle is in service of the progress. This is not a time to be silenced into submission by fear or deadly apathy. Like every generation before us, it is time to keep going. Our ancestors may have taken moments to renew and regroup, but then they kept rising. This is who we are. In one more familiar line from “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: let us march on ’til victory is won.