Elis unite with ‘Banner’

Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 At 12:30 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 5, a small group of students near Old Campus’s McClellan Hall was the first in a ring of 700 students to break into the national anthem. It was a celebration of President-elect Barack Obama’s electoral victory. It was a song to which students from all races knew the words. And that, said Rodney Reynolds ’10, was exactly the point. Black students marching from the Afro-American Cultural Center to Old Campus decided at the last minute to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and not “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”, the black national anthem. “We thought of how this victory was not only one for African-Americans, but also one for all Americans,” Rodney Reynolds ’10 said in an e-mail message. “At the point of this realization we thought it may have been somewhat... [read full story]