A Timely Remix of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ Out of a New York Prison (Redemption Songs, Marshall Project)
The pageantry of July 4th can make you cynical, as you look at America’s failures and cruelties and think, What, exactly, should I be celebrating here? Alfred Roberts was feeling a similar disillusionment at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility on January 6, 2021, as he watched a mob storm the U.S. Capitol from a television in his cell.He wondered aloud to his friends about how the mostly White rioters would have been treated had they been Black. “Your mind does go back to marches on Selma and the visuals of water hoses and dogs,” he told me recently.He worked out his reaction to that moment by writing a song called “Victory.” He borrowed lyrics and melodic fragments from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the James Weldon Johnson song written in 1900 that is now known as the Black national anthem.“I wonder if there’s another fight in us,” Roberts sings. “‘Cause it’s hard to see the signs that we’re still marginalized.”