Lift Every Voice And Sing

It's easy to find someone who sees happiness as a rationed commodity so don't you (whoever you are) take too much joy in something going on around here, or else (I'm never sure what is supposed to happen after the 'or else' part). 

That said, when looking at Norwich events and the people with whom we share our city, why do we wait for the other shoe to drop when we could dance barefoot? We keep checking the reaction at the cool kids' lunch table, forgetting there are no cool kids (or lunch or tables, come to think of it). 

It takes every kind of people, sang Robert Palmer, to make what life is all about and we have the singular good fortune in The Rose City to have just about every kind of people there are. So, we should be as filled with life as the days are long (or maybe more so) and recognize there are often more songs to be sung than voices to share. Today is one of those days.

This morning at eleven at the David Ruggles Memorial Freedom Courtyard at our City Hall is the 35th Juneteenth Commemoration Ceremony and Flag Raising marking the 159th anniversary of Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. 

Juneteenth combines "June" and "nineteenth", commemorating the order issued by the Union Army's Major General Gordon Granger, on the morning of June 19, 1865, who'd arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, to enforce the emancipation of its slaves and oversee Reconstruction. That order proclaimed freedom for slaves in Texas in the aftermath of the surrender of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021 when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

I’m sure those attending this morning’s ceremonies will share this song. I wanted you to enjoy the words as the poetic hymn James Weldon Johnson intended them to be.

 Lift Every Voice and Sing

Till 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 till 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 sighed?

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

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.

Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
Our native land.

Happy Juneteenth!
-bill kenny