Cleveland kidnapping victim Michelle Knight has written a memoir, Finding Me, A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed. Two years have passed since she and two other women (Amanda Berry and Gina de Jesus) escaped from their captor Ariel Castro. Knight is giving one-on-one interviews with the press including NBC’s Russ Mitchell.
Mitchell discovered that Michelle Knight – who now goes by the name Lily – likes to sing. To help her get through bad times, bad memories, she sings the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson in 1899. Johnson was the principal of the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida. The school was celebrating Lincoln’s birthday on February 12, 1900. Johnson wrote the words to introduce the school’s guest, Booker T. Washington. In 1919, the NAACP dubbed it The Negro National Anthem (now the Black American National Anthem) “for its power in voicing the cry for liberation and affirmation for African American people.”
