I Am the American Negro (collection)/'Mancipation Day
'MANCIPATION DAY
In Chicago, Atlanta, Louisville, Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston a million kaleidoscopic people gather and lift high hosannas in memory of a misty Emancipation Day
(In hobo camps from Maine to California sprawl a thousand bums recalling the hour gates closed behind them at Sing Sing, Joliet, Leavenworth, San Quentin)
In Birmingham they ride jim-crow cars to a nigger park guarded by white cops ready to shoot to kill if the black bastards annex the idea they're human and Citizens of Alabama . . . listening brown folk balloon with pride as sweet speeched speakers canonize Lincoln—the air reeks with the stench of burned brothers lynched in courthouse yards
In Gary, Indiana, from the hot bellies of steel mills come celebrants . . . tomorrow some will starve as their jobs are snatched and given to Jan Pidarski direct from Ellis Island . . . tomorrow others sweat gold for the gods of the steel corporation in whose shrines none may walk
Words splash like water over ebony skulls . . . see a people proud because white men died, another freed them when impotent ancestors worked the plantation while Ole Massa fought their liberators
(In the hobo jungles let there be barbecues and long winded programs . . . let Convict 67895 and his comrades burst with pride . . . are they not the ones set free by the whims of the prison commission?
Praise ye Warden Laws of Sing Sing
And the New York Board of Pardons and Paroles:
They gave us our freedom!)
And the New York Board of Pardons and Paroles:
They gave us our freedom!)