Why walk the globe with head bowed, Blackman?
Is it because they consider you a sub-human – an animal with tail?
No! Don’t believe them, Blackman.
You are a real man — a man with five perfect senses,
with nostrils that exchange Carbon dioxide for Oxygen,
with veins through which red blood also flows.
Why walk the globe with head bowed, Blackman?
Is it because they tell you that your Motherland never had a civilization of its own?
No! That’s false, Blackman.
Thousands of years ago when they could not tell their left from their right,
your forefathers had a civilization blooming on the banks of the Nile;
in the magnificent palace of the Ghana Empire, and in the walls of higher learning in Timbuktu.
Why walk the globe with head bowed, Blackman?
Is it because they claim that your race has produced no great men or great women?
No! They tricked you, Blackman.
Your black race gave the world King Mansa Musa, Harriett Tubman, Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, and Nelson Mandela.
But you still walk the globe with head bowed, Blackman.
Is it because they never stop calling you a savage, a beast?
No! Don’t accept that, Blackman.
What amount of savagery compares with the ruthless packaging of the best and brightest of the black race on slave ships only to have hewers of wood and drawers of water on one’s plantations?
Blackman, with your blood and sweat you have helped to build Europe and America.
Now reclaim your manhood, march your race once more to the front seat of history, and never again walk with your head bowed, Blackman!
Written and first released in February 1997 in commemoration of BLACK HISTORY MONTH.