Poet, novelist, composer, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson penned this poem in 1900. Five years later, to honor of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set the poem to music, transforming it into a song that was first performed in public by a chorus of five hundred Black schoolchildren at a school ceremony in Jacksonville, Florida. The Johnson brothers subsequently relocated to New York City from Jacksonville, where the song continued to be sung by African American students who learned it from their teachers.