We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

These lines come from James Weldon Johnson’s poem-lyric “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday at the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, where Johnson was principal. The song quickly circulated beyond the event, especially after Johnson’s brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set the words to music. In the early 20th century it became widely adopted in African American communities and was later promoted by the NAACP as the “Negro National Anthem.” The quoted couplet appears in the second stanza, which recalls the collective suffering and violence endured on the long path from slavery toward freedom and civic belonging.

The speaker uses a communal “we” to frame Black history as a shared journey marked by grief and bloodshed. “With tears has been watered” suggests endurance through sorrow that nonetheless nourishes persistence and hope, while “blood of the slaughtered” evokes the lethal costs of slavery, racial terror, and the struggle for emancipation. The lines compress generations of trauma into a single forward movement—“we have come”—insisting on survival as an achievement and a moral claim. Within the poem’s larger arc, this remembrance of suffering underwrites the hymn’s resolve: progress is neither accidental nor free, and the call to faith and steadfastness is grounded in historical sacrifice.

1) “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered; / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”
2) “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, / We have come, treading our paths through the blood of the slaughtered.”