This is the Fourth Of You Lie, by Kevin Rashid Johnson.
You called it Independence Day.
Oh my, how you lie.
Cuz’ Black folks were still slaves on that day in July.
If taxation without representation was just cause for outrage,
How about being enslaved from cradle to grave?
To enrich people with our labor who refused themselves to work,
Maybe sold off at a whim sleeping in crude shanties, lying on dirt.
No security, no creature comforts, the most precarious lifestyle.
White men enter your abode, take liberties with your wife or child.
Our only respite, cast our eyes to the sky.
We cry, we die. That was our fourth of July.
This day you cherish, elate, celebrate,
We hate because it was our bondage that it commemorates,
Destroyed families, bullwhips, packs of Negro hounds
To ensure we remained in bondage trained to run us down.
If we even entertained the idea of going free,
We were stripped and whipped bound fast to a tree.
And dare we fight back in the urge to protect
Our families ourselves, we’d be hanged by the neck.
In misery un-free we lived and died.
That’s the meaning to Black people of your Fourth of July.
But you gloss over this history celebrating our tragedy every year.
Like memorializing the Nazis, the analogy so clear.
A federal holiday fireworks blasted like –
Like the gunfire across the brows of slaves dared to take flight.
Murder and mayhem being chased into the night
For pursuing the independence you now celebrate
That your fathers took as their right.
A day to parade about freedom.
Oh, how you lie.
Slavery then, cell blocks now.
The hypocrisy of your Fourth of July.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
