Not a house in the country ain’t packed
To its rafters with some Dead Negro’s Grief—²
In the murky waters of fetid Tenements, a city of
Black people is convulsed in desperate living, like
The voracious churnings of hungry cannibal fish—³
Suppose each skin had it’s Crimes writ on it,
When we cast our eyes upon that White Skin
We should enter our Protest upon it immediately!⁴
But the hurt Black of our skin is Forbidden—⁵
First to Die for
The Flag we now hold
High—was a Black man!⁶
We see nothing in our Dark
Men but a vast engine of Labor.⁷
History lets the blamed go blameless for
The Blood that flows Black in the streets—⁸
Black folk will always get Lynched
But they stopped using Ropes.⁹
When old junk man Death comes to gather
Our Bodies and toss them into the sack of Oblivion—
Will he find the corpse of a white multi-millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity than the
Black Torso of a Negro Cotton-Picker?¹⁰
¹ Hussam Al Rassam, quoted by Haifa Zangana in Songs of Iraqi Resistance
² Toni Morrison, Beloved
³ Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem
⁴ William Apess, An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man
⁵ Gwendolyn Brooks, The Near-Johannesburg Boy
⁶ Stevie Wonder, Black Man
⁷ Olive Schreiner, The Native Question
⁸ Reginald Dwayne Betts, For the City that Nearly Broke Me
⁹ Nile Lansana & Onam Lansana, Lesson one
¹⁰ Langston Hughes, Question