For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly:
their dirges and their ditties and their blues and their jubilees,
praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees
to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years,
to the gone years, and the now years and the maybe years, washing
ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting
pruning patching dragging alone never gaining never reaping never
knowing never understanding

For my 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 we discovered we were
black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody
wondered and nobody understood.

For the boys and girls who grew up in spite of these things to be
Man and Woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear
children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th street in Chicago and Lennox Avenue
in New York and Rampart street in New Orleans, lost disinherited and
dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and
other people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land
and money and something--something all our own;

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 amongst ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and
councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed
and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
prayed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false
prophet and holy believer.

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from
confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a
world that will hold all the people, all the face, all the Adams and
Eves and their countless generations;

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 people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full
of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our
spirit and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.