About Lift Every Voice

Lift Every Voice (LEV) was born on June 6, 2020. When social anthropologist Michelle A. Tisdel woke up the day after the “We can’t breathe. Justice for George Floyd” demonstration in Oslo, her first thought was: We must take care of the posters!

Protest posters are important source material, ethnographic objects that represent individual contributions to a broader social movement and democratic practice. The material must be collected and preserved as examples of free speech, community perspectives, and narratives about racism, social justice, and Norwegian society.

Michelle A. Tisdel, PhD

Social anthropologist Michelle A. Tisdel holds a doctorate from Harvard University and has worked nearly 15 years in the heritage sector in Norway. Tisdel's research interests include heritage production and institutions, as well as belonging, participatory processes, and autobiographical and community narratives.

Collecting source material and promoting the history and narratives of “Multicultural” and minority communities requires adequate competence, resources, and priorities. Sector-wide challenges and priorities can result in community perspectives and stories becoming objects of diversity initiatives and strategies.

Institutions sometimes lack the ability to access and assess the source community's emic perspectives. Short-term projects, funding, and notions of relevance can also characterize the approach to collecting and much of this material.

"Multicultural" and community source material can also have a peripheral status in relation to broader institutional priorities, strategic goals, and recruitment practices.

Lift Every Voice and Sing
By James Weldon Johnson

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.