Dreamin' A Rock and Roll Poem fa De Right Rebren Doktor Martin Luther King, Jr.

  
Collage, King of the Long March, by Verneda Lights.

Rosa Parks put Alabama

on the map for us,

When she refused a must

Remember

white faces only at the hot dog stand

cullud folks in the movie balcony,

pledgin’ allegiance to democracy and

Remember

Bull Connors ridin’ on the back of a horse,

spreadin’ death with the ashes of a burning cross?

Black heads bowed in prayer, beaten in,

hundreds arrested in sit ins,

then up jump

de Reb’ren Doktor Martin Luther King.

Recall

A Southern preacher speakin’ God’s own holy freedom

to the masses in the rain

how could he stand the pain?

In jail, on his knees.

(Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee)

arguin’ for a new reality

for a dream

about black and white children being free.

Meanwhile handcuffs were slapped on blacks knocked down

by the angry waters of a fire hose,

now don’t you suppose God His self wouldn’t abide,

dogs with teeth buried in a black man’s hide

For dreamin’ equal education:

dreams vs. brown vs. the board of education,

dreamin’ angry fists on iron bars,

dreamin

the restless

children

of tar.

There were those who dreamed

Temptations, Supremes,

Napalm & Vietnam,

Negritude & Franz Fanon,

Boog-a-loo &

do-wop a-wa-wa-tootsie,

Malcolm the angry revolutionary.

He dreamed non-violence,

Mahatma Gandhi,

he saw nightmare death in Tennessee.

Sometimes human flesh equals dust equals dirt,

and a dream is a rare crystal on this planet we call earth.

But now that we seen the wasteland

from the mountain top,

what man’s gon’ stop!

Our dreamin’

Hey !

Our dreamin’?

Poem, Copyright © 1977-2006 Verneda Lights

Music: Mahalia Jackson, " We Shall Overcome"