WHY I LOVE BEING BLACK: Our Sense of Community, Deep Faith in God, and Our Primal Connection to Music

Something about Black History Month makes folks feel like we have to sing sad Negro spirituals that nobody really knows the meaning of. We’re just told this is how our enslaved ancestors made it to freedom. “Okay, Sister James.”

You can probably tell I’m not a fan of the Negro spirituals, mostly because I don’t know what those people were talmbout. But that Black National Anthem? That one slaps. Okay… I’m done talking like a dude who grew up in Orlando.

Many times, Black History Month is framed from a sad perspective—one of perpetual struggle, remembrance of slain civil rights leaders and rebels, with the occasional, “You know it was a Black man who invented the traffic light?” I want to tell our history from a place of power, purpose, and perseverance, set to the tune of "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

We’re going to talk about when West Africans first set foot on this strange land by force, and how, from the very beginning, they made this country prosperous under the constant threat of death and harm from the savages who kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and raped them for 246 years.

Stanza 1 — “Lift every voice and sing…”

Imagine being told to celebrate while living through one of the worst periods of Black life in America.

Written in 1900 to honor the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" begins triumphantly as a call to celebrate the abolition of slavery and the hope of a better future for Black people—people of African descent in North America. The year 1900 was an interesting time for the formerly enslaved; it marked the "Nadir of race relations," the lowest point. Conditions were at their worst. This period began in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South—what you probably learned in school as the Compromise of 1877. What followed was hell on earth for Black people: the beginning of the Jim Crow era. With no troops to protect them, white supremacist groups terrorized Black communities, Black political power was dismantled, lynching surged, and legal segregation became a way of life in the South.

But despite all of this… our ancestors flourished. Businesses were built; colleges were founded (my own alma mater, FAMU—then The State Normal College for Colored Students—was founded in 1887); churches and civic organizations were formed; and art, scholarship, and music (including "Lift Every Voice and Sing") moved forward. Mutual aid networks developed, and this period ultimately laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. Despite oppression, Black communities built independent institutions, with Black people owning 25% of Southern acreage by 1900.

In the middle of all this, Johnson doesn’t call for silence or mourning; he calls for song. In a time when despair would have been justified, he calls for faith expressed in song. And somehow, in the middle of all this madness, James Weldon Johnson tells us to sing until heaven and earth ring with the harmonies of liberty; to let our rejoicing rise as high as the listening skies in the face of oppression; and to let that rejoicing reverberate as loudly as the sea our ancestors crossed when they were taken to this land.

He then calls us to sing a song of faith that the dark past has taught us. It's funny that, in the face of the Nadir of race relations, he implies that even this moment was not worse than enslavement.

Then he goes full-on lunatic… telling us to sing a song of hope that the present has brought us. Hope, my boy? Lynching, disenfranchisement—we can’t vote. But what I imagine him doing is prophesying; in the midst of despair, we must hold on to hope, face the rising sun of a new day begun, and march on until victory is won.

It is not a denial of reality, but a refusal to let reality have the final word—a reminder that hope, for Black people, has never depended on the environment we found ourselves in. It was our faith… in us, each other, and God.

Stanza 2 — “Stony the road we trod...”

Stony the road we trod / Bitter the chastening rod / Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.

Era: Slavery — Our Beginning — A Foundation of Strength

1500s–1800s | Middle Passage & Diaspora Survival

Stony the road we trod… The Middle Passage stands as one of the most brutal journeys in recorded history. Famously portrayed in the film Amistad, our ancestors were packed into the belly of ships—chained, stacked, unable to move, forced to relieve themselves where they lay, vomiting, sick, many dying before land ever came into view. Writing this now makes my eyes water, thinking about how human beings were treated as cargo, as less than human, as something to be delivered rather than people to be protected.

Some chose to throw themselves overboard. I do not know if they understood what waited on the other side of that ocean, but they knew enough to understand they were being taken from everything they had ever known and would never return. For them, hope was already gone. They chose the certainty of the ocean over the uncertainty of chains. The waters would not carry them home, but they believed those waters would carry them to their ancestors—and that was enough.

Others chose to endure, to “see what the end was going to be.” They survived disease, starvation, beatings, rape, and suffocating conditions until they reached a land they had never seen and did not choose.

Bitter the chastening rod… Because the suffering did not end when the ships docked; in many ways, it had only begun. Violence, punishment, forced labor, family separation, and constant surveillance were used to break bodies and spirits alike. People from different regions of Africa—with different languages, customs, religions, and histories—were deliberately mixed so they could not organize easily. Some may have been strangers, rivals, or even enemies in another life. Now they had no choice but to become a community.

Out of that forced togetherness came something new. Over time they would be labeled “Negro,” then “colored,” then “Black,” then “African American.” But beneath every label was the same truth: they were the foundation of us. We stand on their shoulders of strength, resolve, and fortitude—rebuilding a culture that would be the awe of the world to come, preserving ties to Africa both visible (our skin) and subtle (our nature).

Ain’t nobody like us, baby. The crossing ended, but the struggle had only begun.

Foundation of Strength — Who Was Taken

Sometimes we are shown images of Africans crowded onto ships and taught to see only victims—primitive, godless people with nothing to offer but labor. That story is as convenient as it is an injustice. Many of those taken were highly skilled people from organized societies across West and Central Africa. In fact, traders often targeted specific regions precisely because of the knowledge those communities possessed.

Among them were people from pastoral societies with deep expertise in livestock management. They knew how to raise animals in intense heat, control disease in tropical climates, breed for strength and survival, rotate grazing to preserve land, and produce reliable sources of meat and milk. Those skills became foundational to Southern agriculture.

We know about picking cotton and sometimes rice, but other crops mattered just as much. Indigo, for example, was a valuable blue dye that powered the British clothing industry and was grown extensively in Georgia and the Carolinas. Processing it required complex fermentation and precise handling. Africans brought that knowledge too, helping make indigo one of the colonies’ most profitable exports before the American Revolution (1765–1783).

Africans also reshaped what people ate. They introduced crops from their homelands—okra, watermelon, black-eyed peas, sesame—foods that thrived in Southern soil and are still eaten today. What we call “Southern food” is, in many ways, African survival cuisine turned tradition… see chitterlings, oxtails, and ham hocks (pork knuckle… I personally have not had the pleasure).

Rice may be the clearest example of imported expertise. The rice economy of the Carolinas did not emerge from European experimentation alone; it was built on agricultural systems already perfected in West Africa. Enslaved Africans applied sophisticated knowledge of irrigation, flood control, soil conditions, and harvesting, transforming coastal swamps into some of the most productive farmland in the colonies.

Wholly, this history makes one thing unmistakable: Africans did not arrive as blank slates. They arrived as farmers, herders, engineers, cooks, builders, and knowledge keepers. The wealth of the South—and by extension much of the nation—rested not only on their labor (bodies) but on the expertise (minds) they carried with them.

“Yet with a steady beat...”

Yet with a steady beat / Have not our weary feet / Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

1820s–1865 | Resistance → Civil War → Emancipation

Yet with a steady beat… Freedom did not suddenly appear out of nowhere at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was forced into existence by decades of relentless resistance—quiet, loud, visible, hidden, legal, illegal, spiritual, and physical.

Our ancestors were not sitting around politely waiting for liberation; they were pushing history forward by strategically planting seeds of rebellion against the status quo. They escaped, organized, wrote, fought, sabotaged, negotiated, prayed, and demanded. They made slavery impossible to ignore for the North and the world, and even harder to defend for those invested in its survival.

They served as spies for the Union Army, carried intelligence across enemy lines, confronted political leaders directly, and forced the North to confront the human reality of slavery instead of treating it like a distant Southern inconvenience. They made it clear that slavery was not just a regional problem—it was America’s moral crisis.

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery… and then turned around and went back. Again and again. She led dozens to freedom through the Underground Railroad, risking capture or death every single time. When the Civil War broke out, she did not retire into safety; she joined the Union effort as a scout, spy, nurse, and guide. Most famously, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed more than 700 enslaved people in one operation. She did not wait for freedom to arrive; she went into enemy territory and brought it out with her.

Frederick Douglass fought with words just as dangerous as weapons. After escaping slavery, he became the most powerful abolitionist voice in the nation—publishing newspapers, lecturing across the United States and Europe, and relentlessly pressing the government to treat the war as a fight against slavery, not just a fight to preserve the Union. He met with President Abraham Lincoln multiple times, speaking truth to power about Black enlistment, equal treatment, and the moral urgency of emancipation. Douglass did not flatter Lincoln; he challenged him… and Lincoln listened.

When Lincoln hesitated on equal pay for Black soldiers and protection for those captured by Confederate forces, Douglass confronted him again. Eventually, the Union authorized Black enlistment, and nearly 200,000 Black men served in the Union Army and Navy, helping turn the tide of the war.

Have not our weary feet… Because this fight was exhausting in ways we can barely imagine. Harriet Jacobs’s story reveals another form of resistance—the fight to survive, to protect family, and to retain control over one’s own body and future under a system designed to strip all three away.

To escape her enslaver’s sexual abuse and protect her children, she hid for seven years in a crawlspace above her grandmother’s shed. Not a room—a crawlspace. Barely enough space to sit upright, no light, little air, unable to stand or move freely, listening to her children play below without being able to hold them. This was not retreat from the struggle but a refusal to surrender to it.

When she finally reached the North, she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, forcing the nation to confront a truth it preferred not to see: slavery was not just forced labor—it was control over bodies, families, and futures.

Resistance happened in courtrooms, too. Enslaved people sued for freedom and sometimes won. The captives of the Amistad fought back against their kidnappers and were ultimately declared free by the Supreme Court. These victories did not end slavery, but they proved it could be challenged, resisted, and even defeated within the legal system of a country built upon it.

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? By the time the Civil War erupted, freedom was not a gift waiting to be handed down from above. It had been demanded, fought for, written into existence, smuggled across borders, prayed for, and bled for. Black people were not passive spectators to their own liberation. They were strategists, soldiers, writers, organizers, and witnesses. They forced America to confront itself—morally, politically, and militarily.

This was the steady beat—not one dramatic moment, but a relentless drum of resistance that would not stop until the dream of freedom, whispered, prayed for, and sighed over by generations, was no longer just imagined but real.

“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered...”

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

1865–1915 | Reconstruction → Rise of Black Institutions

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered… Freedom came, but it did not come gently. It came to people who had buried children, lost parents, been sold away from spouses, survived whippings, starvation, rape, and forced labor—and then were told, essentially, “You’re free now. Good luck.” No land. No money. No protection. In many cases, not even proof of identity beyond a former owner’s word. One day enslaved, the next day expected to function in a society that had never intended to treat them as human. And still… we built.

Families searched across states trying to find loved ones torn apart by sale. Notices were posted in newspapers—names, descriptions, last known locations—desperate attempts to reconnect pieces of shattered families. Marriages that had never been legally recognized were finally made official. Schools sprang up anywhere learning could happen—churches, cabins, fields, abandoned buildings. People who had been punished for learning to read now taught others openly.

Black men voted, held office, and helped rewrite laws in states that had enslaved them only years earlier. Churches became the center of everything—sanctuary, schoolhouse, bank, political headquarters, social hub, and emergency relief agency. Colleges like Howard, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, and Hampton were founded because education meant survival, independence, and a future no one could take away.

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered… Because freedom did not end the violence. It provoked it. White supremacist terror campaigns—lynchings, massacres, intimidation, voter suppression—were organized specifically to destroy Black political power and economic progress before it could solidify. Slavery was gone, but sharecropping replaced it with a system that kept families trapped in debt and dependency, tied to land they did not own and could rarely leave. Promises like “forty acres and a mule” evaporated, leaving people to rebuild from nothing while under constant threat.

So we adjusted—because survival demanded it. If doors stayed closed, we built our own. If institutions excluded us, we created our own. Black newspapers told the truth when nobody else would. Mutual aid societies helped widows, children, and families weather crisis after crisis. Businesses opened. Entire towns were founded. Systems for survival—and progress—took shape despite violence designed to stop both.

This was not an easy journey upward. It was forward motion through grief, through fear, through loss. Freedom did not arrive clean; it arrived stained with tears and blood. But it ignited something that could not be extinguished—a determination to exist, to build, to claim space, and to refuse to disappear no matter how high the cost.

“Out from the gloomy past…”

Till now we stand at last / Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

1915–1968 | Civil Rights & Moral Leadership

Out from the gloomy past… Jim Crow tried to lock Black people inside a permanent nightmare—segregation, terror, and humiliation codified into law. But Black life did not shrink; it expanded. I’m not going to spend a lot of time here because Black History Month—and American history in general—already parks here like it’s the only chapter that exists. And yes, Jim Crow was evil. Yes, the Civil Rights Movement reshaped this country for everyone, not just Black folks. And yes, now there are people trying to rewrite that history as something shameful—but what they’re really upset about is losing unquestioned dominance, not losing injustice. I’ll leave that right there.

Even under that pressure, we moved. The Great Migration carried millions north and west, away from lynching trees and sharecropping fields into cities where opportunity was limited but not impossible. We brought our culture with us—our food, our music, our faith, our way of speaking. When I lived in Chicago, I was always surprised how “country” people sounded… until I realized they were Southern migrants. You can leave the South, but the South doesn’t leave you.

Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, Detroit, and Los Angeles became centers of Black enterprise, art, and intellectual life. The Harlem Renaissance announced to the world that Black life was sophisticated, modern, creative, and beautiful. Our star had been shining all along—now its light was spilling into the wider world whether anyone was ready or not.

Meanwhile, ordinary people were doing extraordinary things to dismantle segregation piece by piece. Ida B. Wells exposed lynching when most of the country preferred silence. Black soldiers fought in two world wars and came home demanding the rights they had defended abroad. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Students sat at lunch counters knowing violence would follow. Freedom Riders boarded buses not knowing if they would make it to the next stop alive. Children walked into hostile schools under armed guard just to get an education.

Leadership emerged with different approaches but the same urgency. Martin Luther King Jr. framed civil rights as a moral crisis rooted in faith. Malcolm X spoke to dignity, self-determination, and the right to defend one’s humanity. And television—for the first time—broadcast Southern racial brutality into living rooms across America. Suddenly the country could not pretend it did not know what was happening. White audiences watched police dogs, fire hoses, bombings, and beatings in real time and had to confront the truth: the past was not past at all.

Till now we stand at last… After generations of struggle, resistance, organizing, prayer, and sacrifice, legal segregation finally began to fall. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Landmark decisions that forced the country to live closer to the ideals it had always claimed. Freedom was still incomplete, but the ground had shifted. Black Americans were no longer pleading to be seen; they were demanding to be recognized.

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. The brilliance of Black leadership, creativity, courage, and moral authority was undeniable. The world was watching. America was watching. And for the first time, it could not look away. That star had always been there—forged in slavery, sharpened in Reconstruction, sustained through Jim Crow. This era did not create it; it simply forced the nation to stand still long enough to see it shining.

Stanza 3 — “God of our weary years…”

1619–Present | Faith & Community — The Constant

God of our weary years… If one thread runs unbroken through the Black experience in America, it is faith. Not always polished. Not always formal. Sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, sometimes the only thing left when everything else had been taken. A lifeline.

Enslaved Africans carried spiritual traditions with them and, under unimaginable pressure, forged something new—a faith rooted in survival and liberation. In hush harbors, away from watchful eyes, they prayed to a God who saw them even when the world refused to.

After emancipation, the church became the center of community life—sanctuary, school, meeting place, credit union, counseling center, political hub, and emergency relief system all in one. Communities organized education and worship almost immediately after emancipation. Much of the institutional support for these efforts came through the Freedmen’s Bureau, led from 1865–1874 by General Oliver Otis Howard, an evangelical Christian (not like the ones we have today) and one of the Union’s most committed anti-slavery officers.

General Howard played a major role in helping freed slaves establish teachers, schools, and preachers during Reconstruction as the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Under Howard’s leadership, the Bureau helped establish thousands of schools for formerly enslaved people, recruited and funded teachers (Black and white, Northern and Southern), supplied books, buildings, and transportation, supported teacher training programs, and worked with missionary societies and Black communities. The impact of his work was that by the early 1870s, hundreds of thousands of freed people had received formal education for the first time in their lives. Howard would go on to help found Howard University (1867), whose focus was to train Black teachers, ministers, doctors, and lawyers.

Faith did not stay inside buildings. It fueled movements. Spirituals carried coded messages. Gospel carried hope through Jim Crow. Sermons framed justice not as a political preference but as a moral obligation.

God of our silent tears… Because exhaustion has always been part of the story too. Private grief. Public strength. Losses that never made headlines but shaped families for generations. Community stepped in where systems failed. Care showed up in kitchens, hospital waiting rooms, front porches, carpools, and collections taken up quietly—somebody was always bringing a plate. Mutual care was not charity; it was survival. Faith did not erase suffering. It made survival possible.

1968–Present | Representation & Influence

Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way…

After 1968 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the victories won in streets, courtrooms, and sacrifice began to reshape everyday life. Doors that had been shut for generations started to open, and Black Americans stepped through them not as visitors, but as leaders, builders, and trailblazers.

In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress. Four years later, she ran for president of the United States—the first Black candidate from a major party and the first woman to seek that nomination. "Unbought and unbossed," she declared, forcing the nation to confront possibilities it had never seriously considered.

In Texas, Barbara Jordan rose to national prominence as the first Black woman from the South elected to Congress. Her voice during the Watergate hearings carried moral authority that cut through politics, reminding the country what the Constitution demanded, not just what power allowed.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States—a milestone generations had prayed for but few had lived to see. His election did not erase inequality, but it shattered the assumption that the highest office was permanently out of reach.

In 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court—a position once used to deny Black Americans their humanity, now occupied by a Black woman interpreting the law itself.

In 2020, Kamala Harris was elected Vice President of the United States—the first woman, the first Black American, and the first person of South Asian descent to hold the office. Four years later, in 2024, she became the first Black woman to lead a major party presidential ticket, a milestone that extended the path first opened by Shirley Chisholm more than half a century earlier. Her candidacy reflected a profound shift in what the nation had come to accept as possible: a Black woman not merely participating in power, but seeking the presidency itself. For many Americans, it was living proof that the barriers once declared permanent had continued to fall, one generation at a time.

Barriers that once seemed permanent began to fall one by one. Black Americans stepped into rooms we had been locked out of and proved we belonged there—not as tokens, but as leaders, decision-makers, and creators of the future. We ran cities, shaped national policy, led major institutions, built global companies, and set the cultural pace for the world. Every “first” made it harder to argue that we did not belong and easier for the next person to walk through that door without asking permission.

Being brought this far means knowing none of it happened by accident. It happened because people before us fought, sacrificed, organized, prayed, and refused to quit when quitting would have been easier. To stand here now is to carry their work forward—with gratitude, with responsibility, and with the understanding that the path we walk was paid for by people who were never allowed to walk it themselves.

“Keep us forever in the path…”

Present → Future | Responsibility

Keep us forever in the path, we pray… I love being Black because we carry history forward, not just behind us.

Every generation inherits victories it did not personally win and wounds it did not personally suffer, yet both become our responsibility. Rights must be protected. Knowledge has to be passed down. Communities require investment, not just nostalgia. Culture has to be stewarded, not just consumed.

Mentorship, mutual aid, and collective advancement remain defining features of Black life. Success is rarely framed as individual. When one person rises, the question is often who else can be lifted too. The path forward is intentional: lifting as we climb.

“True to our God / True to our native land”

Closing — Identity & Belonging

True to our God… I love being Black because our deep faith in God—and the community that grew from it—carried us through every chapter of this history and shaped who we are today. I love being Black because of our deep faith in God (connected through music), a higher power, the universe…whatever you wish to call it. We sang spirituals to get us through; in the midst of oppression, whether that be slavery, Jim Crow, racism, anti-DEI, etc. Those spirituals would transform into Gospel, Jazz, Rock & Roll, Soul music, R&B, Rap, and so on. What changed was the sound; what remained was the spirit behind it.

The backdrop and also the focus was God as “deliverer.” So many of the stories we would hear about slavery and the enslaved—their motivation and inspiration—were about Moses and the Children of Israel fleeing Egypt. “Go Down, Moses” was, for enslaved African Americans, a powerful symbol: “Israel” became a metaphor for themselves, “Pharaoh” for slave masters, and “Egypt” for the oppressive South. Slave owners allowed these stories to be taught, not realizing they were nurturing the very hope that would fuel resistance and the desire for freedom.

“True to our God” has a nuanced role in our world because many of our folks believe that believing in God should mean that we play a passive role in our future i.e., “God will set us free when He’s ready.” That view treats faith as waiting. I am not of that belief. For me, faith is action—the belief that God empowers us to pursue justice, dignity, happiness, and fulfillment in this world, not only the next. Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life more abundantly.” Whatever stance you take, faith in God and in ourselves has always been at the center. It steadied us when circumstances said we should break.

True to our native land… Because faith did not exist in isolation; it was lived out by people, families, and communities rooted here through suffering and survival. It simply means that we remember those first and succeeding Africans kidnapped and brought here by savages. We honor their endurance, their fight, and their sacrifice.

To be true to this land is not to forget what happened here, but to recognize that our story is woven into it. We helped build this country with our labor, shaped it with our culture, and challenged it to live up to its own ideals. We should work every day to honor them and their memory—not only by remembering their suffering, but by using the opportunities they never had to build something worthy of their sacrifice.

That is why I love being Black. Because no matter what this country has been, or what it becomes, we have never had to face it alone.