By CB Murray*** When the Black Lives Matter protests began, a friend of mine, Theresa M. Collins, was inspired by a poem I wrote and posted on Facebook, communicating my emotions over the killing of George Floyd. She suggested that I do something or write something that we could present to an audience. Well, since I’d been in quarantine since March, the first thing that came to mind was a Zoom presentation. So, I started brainstorming ideas for Zoom. Then, I remembered the arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” I’d written for PEARL the Musical, and wondered how we could present that on line. I’d seen multiple videos of cast members doing songs from various Broadway shows on Zoom and decided we could do that. I reached out to my musical director, Charles Czarnecki, and asked him if he was up for doing a special version of the song to be broadcast and recorded on Zoom. He was excited about the idea and immediately started sharing ways that we could musically pull it off.
The version of the song in the show is only about two minutes long and was created to be accompanied by the Bill Bailey character’s tap dancing. In order to make the song longer we needed to sing more than one verse. I love the song and I’ve been singing it for all of my life, but I didn’t feel like any of the other verses were relevant for the cultural revolution we are experiencing now in 2020. James Johnson wrote it as a poem, and later his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set it to music in 1905. In 1919 the NAACP named it the “Negro National Anthem.”
Time does not allow, in this article, to recount the struggles of African Americans in the United States over the last one hundred and fifteen years since the conception of this anthem. The second, third and fourth verses speak prophetically about enduring the hardships of endless racism and injustice. However, today we are experiencing a different kind of breakthrough and I felt that we were deserving of a new prophetic verse. This perfect storm of Trumpism, COVID-19, Police Brutality and Social Injustice has ignited new life into the calls for equality, civil rights and social justice. What the protestors have accomplished in just the past few months has been astounding. Therefore, I wanted to pen a verse that spoke to our inevitable victory. A verse that would encourage this new generation of activism to march on!
I spoke with members of our PEARL cast—Jennie Harney-Fleming, DeWitt Fleming and Kecia Lewis—about doing the project. One of my neighbors, Tiffany Jackman, a film maker, agreed to help us film the project. So, we scheduled a production Zoom meeting to discuss how we would pull this whole thing off. That meeting was magical. Jennie and DeWitt were online with their new four-week-old baby girl, Ella. Charles was seven hours ahead in Germany. Tiffany was meeting the gang for the first time. I mentioned casually that if it were not for this pandemic we could do a music video. To my surprise everyone started talking about how we could produce a safe, socially distant video shoot in a controlled space.
I had been asked to start a community arts program at church in Jersey City. The church had been sitting empty since March because of the pandemic. It was the perfect controlled location for our video shoot. Charles wrote out the parts and emailed them to all the singers. We all recorded from our homes and emailed our digital files back to Charles. He did all the arrangements, engineering, mixing, played all the instruments and mastered from his living room in Germany. Jennie did costumes via online shopping. Tiffany called her boyfriend and together they got their friends to be our crew. I catered, ran the fans and helped with playback. Jennie’s mother, Olive Harney, came to set and watched baby Ella so that mommy and daddy could film. We wore masks, kept a safe distance from each other, and I’m happy to say, that six weeks after shooting none of us have tested positive for COVID-19.
I wanted to shoot in black and white and then change to color for the end of the video. Tiffany came up with idea to use the “Sin City” effect for highlighting the yellow t-shirt to represent Black Lives Matter. It was important that DeWitt represented the protesters, their willingness, their weariness, struggles to understand, and most importantly, their fortitude to pick themselves back up and get back out there. Kecia and Jennie represent the ancestors, angels, mentors and guides who remind us of our past but propel us towards our victorious prize.
This video is our offering to the cause. We pray that its message inspires. Our hope is that by watching it someone’s hope is restored. A verse in the Bible, Romans 10:17 says “faith comes by hearing;” my prayer is that when you hear this song your faith is restored, and you believe that we win!
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