#Resist: Music Professor Plays Black National Anthem From Bell Tower Before Richard Spencer’s Fla. Speech

By Angela Helm, The Root

22 October 17

s white nationalist troglodyte Richard Spencer prepared to take the stage for his University of Florida speech Thursday, James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (aka the Black National Anthem) rang throughout campus.

Laura Ellis, a music professor at the university, went up 11 flights of stairs in the school’s carillon tower on Thursday to play the song, “to show our support for those who need it most,” Ellis told CNN.

Ellis teaches the carillon, an instrument that plays tuned bells in connection to a keyboard. She and her students perform three songs twice a day from the university’s bell tower as students walk between classes.

On Thursday, the sound of bells took a special tone as the school found itself embroiled in strife over the white nationalist’s speech.

Even though Florida Governor Rick Scott had declared a state of emergency for Alachua County, where the university is located, in case of the same violence that broke out when Spencer participated in a march in Charlottesville, Va., in August; on Thursday, there were only two arrests, and more than 2,500 demonstrators marched against the man credited with starting the “alt-right” movement.

Appropriately, James Weldon Johnson was principal the all-black Stanton School in Florida when he first debuted “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in 1900. The song was later adopted by the NAACP as its official song 19 years later.