Unity's all we ask and need

For Rudy Lewis
On April 1st, 2009, the British police, acting under orders, attacked peaceful demonstrators with batons, causing one death.

                                                            By Richard Lawson

 

Have we, in some small way,
earned battle colours here?
We rainbow whites, greens, reds, browns
have faced the violence of the

ones clothed all in black,
caught in this clash between
provocateurs and servants of authority,
not of the people.

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

Will you now give us your hand
brothers, who have for centuries
suffered the baton blow, the whip lash
and stinging disrespect?

Will you extend to us
the hand of brotherhood,
we offering to you this token blood
that stains our faces, and the London streets?

To you, this was a passing slight,
You’ve been corralled for centuries, not hours
and we were beaten for our thoughts,
not for the colour of our skin.

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And will you, the ones the Nazis
kettled in Warsaw and worse
Auschwitz and Buchenwald
Will you now listen to our song?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And you, who live in terror of the Nazis’
victim’s sons, will you reach out to us
extend the hand of friendship for our wounds,
hear what we have to say?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

And will you, yes our brothers
dressed in black, faces masked,
you with your shields and clubs
to use on undefended flesh,

Will you not start to question why,
Why are these voices to be blocked?
What are they calling for?
Why are these dreamers such a threat?

Unity’s all we ask and need.
One blow’s enough to make us bleed.

© Richard Lawson April 9, 2009

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

By Isabel Wilkerson

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.