NFL to play Black National Anthem at all league games in 2021

The NFL has announced that it will play the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, before all games during the 2021 season. This includes the September kickoff game on the 9th and the playoffs. It is part of the NFL’s 10-year, $250 million commitment to fighting racism in America. The move follows a league-wide test-run last season in which the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was played before the start of games in Week 1 and at Super Bowl 55 in a performance by Alicia Keys. Rap mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation has been advising the league on its “Inspire Change” initiative.

After blackballing elite quarterback Colin Kapernick, who knelt during the national anthem as a silent protest against police brutality, the league’s remarkable turnaround and sudden support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was seen as an astonishing about-face from three years ago. The majority of NFL players are Black, while the owners are white. Despite this new found support for BLM and the league’s eyes being “opened” to the reason for Kapernick’s protest, he has not been able to sign with a team since the controversy started.

Additionally, the league announced it will feature social justice messaging on fields, signage, and helmet decals and public service announcements, according to a report by Front Office Sports. The report says the Black National Anthem will be performed ahead of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It is unclear at this time if the entire song will be sung or just the first verse.

Conservative voices and right-wing media outlets such as FOX news are criticizing the anthem change as politically motivated amid a national cultural shift on race following last year’s police killing of George Floyd. Some are blaming Democrats and casting the Black national anthem as a major cultural concern.

Some think this action by the NFL is a pathetic excuse to pacify black players, along with the millions of blacks that watch the games, purchase the merchandise, and have season tickets. If they truly wanted to effect change, they would be allowing their players to kneel without repercussion, helping Kapernick find a home, and diversifying their head coaches, general managers, and front office jobs. A song is in no way a good start, it is just a pacifier that we are being asked to suck on and shut up in an effort to calm the unrest.

Since Floyd’s videotaped murder in Minneapolis was broadcast across the nation, some of the biggest and most influential names in corporate America, including NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, have fully embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and continue to express an urgent commitment to ending systemic racism in America.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written and composed by the Johnson brothers, a pair of influential men from Jacksonville, Florida. James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson worked together their whole lives, first in show business and later in the pursuit of civil rights. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was publicly performed first as a poem as part of a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by John. In 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) dubbed it “the Negro national anthem” for its power in voicing a cry for liberation and affirmation for African American people.

The complete words to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” — the Black National Anthem

**First Verse**

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

**Second Verse**

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