Mama! Africa!

In sixteen nineteen, evil men from afar

Using wile and lies and gold coins too

Stole us from Ghana, Nigeria, Angola and more

Our homelands, our people, our everything

Oh! Mama! Africa! we cry out for thee.

In dungeons on ships, shackled, lying side by side

In bile and vomit and excrement, carcasses too

Parched and hungry, some died, some lived

As days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months.

Oh Mama! Africa! save us, we pray 

From auction blocks, they displayed us like meat,

Your evil ancestors, our masters became, 

Branded and beaten and given new names 

You took our language, religion, and customs too.

Oh!, Mama! Africa! they stripped us of you.

Dawn up, sun down, we toiled and we slaved

In chains, picked cotton, paid nary a cent

Used us as breeders for children here and there

Raped our women, sold our children, took our dignity

The animals of the field treated better than we.

Toussaint in Haiti, the revolution's begun

For us, Nat Turner and others, freedom‘s a-coming

The lie that's been told that in one eight six three

Lincoln and his proclamation freed the enslaved  

If truth‘s to be told, 'twas we more than he.

The fight for freedom took quite a toll 

One million dead and wounded among the lot

Freedom's word took two years and half 

To the last of the enslaved in Galveston, Texas

Gave birth to Juneteenth, Black Liberation, Jun Jun Day. 

Tricked and promised us forty acres and mule

Sharecropping a ruse to keep us bondage to thee

But while some thrived, Jim Crow you enact

You burned Black Wall Street and massacred us there 

To remind us that less than a person we were.

For civil rights, we fought and wouldn't back down

Through persistence, perseverance, marches, boycotts.

Your dogs and your hose, even your batons too

Men hooded at night and in suits by daybreak

Lynched us on trees, in jobs and banks and real estate too.

Our progress was too much for you and your ilk

You martyred our warriors Malcolm, Martin and Medgar too

And found a way to keep the noose 'round our necks

State sanctioned lynching from clansmen in blue.

Up to this moment in two o two o.

Have you resolved what it is about us you hate?

It’s been all of four hundred one years,

Don't you think you should quit?

We come from a people resilient and strong

When you took us from Africa, you couldn't take Africa from us!