Shaw University - Bear Yearbook (Raleigh, NC)

Page 14 text:

FOR MY PEOPLE Margaret Walker For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly, their dirges and their ditties and their blues jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unknown power, For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood, For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh, For my people standing trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunder- standing, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people. Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth. Let a loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control. 10

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