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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=418987" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Crispus Attucks</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">WHERE shall we seek for a hero, and where shall we find a story?<br>Our laurels are wreathed for conquest, our songs for completed glory.<br>But we honor a shrine unfinished, a column uncapped with pride,<br>If we sing the deed that was sown like seed when Crispus Attucks died.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Shall we take for a sign this Negro-slave with unfamiliar name— <br>With his poor companions, nameless too, till their lives leaped forth in flame?<br>Yea, sorely, the verdict is not for us, to render or deny; <br>We can only interpret the symbol; God chose these men to die— <br>As teachers and types, that to humble lives may chief award be made; <br>That from lowly ones, and rejected stones, the temple's base is laid!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When the bullets leaped from the British guns, no chance decreed their aim:<br>Men see what the royal hirelings saw—a multitude and a flame; <br>But beyond the flame, a mystery; five dying men in the street, <br>While the streams of severed races in the well of a nation meet!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O, blood of the people! changeless tide, through century, creed and race!<br>Still one as the sweet salt sea is one, though tempered by sun and place;<br>The same in the ocean currents, and the same in the sheltered seas;<br>Forever the fountain of common hopes and kindly sympathies;<br>Indian and Negro, Saxon and Celt, Teuton and Latin and Gaul— <br>Mere surface shadow and sunshine; while the sounding unifies all!<br>One love, one hope, one duty theirs! No matter the time or ken,<br>There never was separate heart-beat in all the races of men!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But alien is one—of class, not race—he has drawn the line for himself; <br>His roots drink life from inhuman soil, from garbage of pomp and pelf;<br>His heart beats not with the common beat, he has changed his life-stream's hue; <br>He deems his flesh to be finer flesh, he boasts that his blood is blue:<br>Patrician, aristocrat, tory—whatever his age or name, <br>To the people's rights and liberties, a traitor ever the same. <br>The natural crowd is a mob to him, their prayer a vulgar rhyme; <br>The freeman's speech is sedition, and the patriot's deed a crime. <br>Wherever the race, the law, the land,—whatever the time, or throne, <br>The tory is always a traitor to every class but his own.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thank God for a land where pride is clipped, where arrogance stalks apart;<br>Where law and song and loathing of wrong are words of the common heart;<br>Where the masses honor straightforward strength, and know, when veins are bled,<br>That the bluest blood is putrid blood—that the people's blood is red!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And honor to Crispus Attucks, who was leader and voice that day; <br>The first to defy, and the first to die, with Maverick. Carr, and Gray. <br>Call it riot or revolution, his hand first clenched at the crown; <br>His feet were the first in perilous place to pull the king's flag down; <br>His breast was the first one rent apart that liberty's stream might flow; <br>For our freedom now and forever, his head was the first bid low.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Call it riot or revolution, or mob or crowd, as you may, <br>Such deaths have been seed of nations, such lives shall be honored for aye. <br>They were lawless hinds to the lackeys—but martyrs to Paul Revere;<br>And Otis and Hancock and Warren read spirit and meaning clear. <br>Ye teachers, answer: what shall be done when just men stand in the dock; <br>When the caitiff is robed in ermine, and his sworders keep the lock; <br>When torture is robbed of clemency, and guilt is without remorse; <br>When tiger and panther are gentler than the Christian slaver's curse; <br>When law is a satrap's menace, and order the drill of a horde— <br>Shall the people kneel to be trampled, and bare their neck to the sword?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Not so! by this Stone of Resistance that Boston raises here!<br>By the old North Church's lantern, and the watching of Paul Revere!<br>Not so! by Paris of 'Ninety-Three, and Ulster of 'NinetyEight!<br>By Toussaint in St. Domingo! by the horror of Delhi's gate!<br>By Adams's word to Hutchinson! by the tea that is brewing still!<br>By the farmers that met the soldiers at Concord and Bunker Hill!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Not so! not so! Till the world is done, the shadow of wrong is dread; <br>The crowd that bends to a lord to-day, to-morrow shall strike him dead.<br>There is only one thing changeless: the earth steals from under our feet, <br>The times and manners are passing moods, and the laws are incomplete; <br>There is only one thing changes not, one word that still survives— <br>The slave is the wretch who wields the lash, and not the man in gyves!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There is only one test of contract: is it willing, is it good? <br>There is only one guard of equal right: the unity of blood; <br>There is never a mind unchained and true that class or race allows;<br>There is never a law to be obeyed that reason disavows; <br>There is never a legal sin but grows to the law's disaster, <br>The master shall dropp the whip, and the slave shall enslave the master!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O, Planter of seed in thought and deed has the year of right revolved, <br>And brought the Negro patriot's cause with its problem to be solved? <br>His blood streamed first for the building, and through all the century's years,<br>Our growth of story and fame of glory are mixed with his blood and tears. <br>He lived with men like a soul condemned—derided, defamed, and mute;<br>Debased to the brutal level, and instructed to be a brute. <br>His virtue was shorn of benefit, his industry of reward; <br>His love!—O men, it were mercy to have cut affection's cord; <br>Through the night of his woe, no pity save that of his fellow-slave; <br>For the wage of his priceless labor, the scourging block and the grave!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now, is the tree to blossom? Is the bowl of agony filled? <br>Shall the price be paid, and the honor said, and the word of outrage stilled? <br>And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul? <br>Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole? <br>That nothing is told while the clinging sin remains part unconfessed? <br>That the health of the nation is periled if one man be oppressed?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Has he learned—the slave from the rice-swamps, whose children were sold—has he, <br>With broken chains on his limbs, and the cry in his blood, 'I am free!' <br>Has he learned through affliction's teaching what our Crispus Attucks knew— <br>When Right is stricken, the white and black are counted as one, not two?<br>Has he learned that his century of grief was worth a thousand years <br>In blending his life and blood with ours, and that all his toils and tears <br>Were heaped and poured on him suddenly, to give him a right to stand <br>From the gloom of African forests, in the blaze of the freest land? <br>That his hundred years have earned for him a place in the human van <br>Which others have fought for and thought for since the world of wrong began?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For this, shall his vengeance change to love, and his retribution burn,<br>Defending the right, the weak and the poor, when each shall have his turn;<br>For this, shall he set his woeful past afloat on the stream of night; <br>For this, he forgets as we all forget when darkness turns to light; <br>For this, he forgives as we all forgive when wrong has changed to right.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And so, must we come to the learning of Boston's lesson to-day; <br>The moral that Crispus Attucks taught in the old heroic way; <br>God made mankind to be one in blood, as one in spirit and thought; <br>And so great a boon, by a brave man's death, is never dearly bought!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=John+Boyle+O%27Reilly">John Boyle O'Reilly</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=418987" data-title="Crispus Attucks de John Boyle O'Reilly" data-description="WHERE shall we seek for a hero, and where shall we find a story?
Our laurels are wreathed for conquest, our songs for completed glory.
But we honor a shrine unfinished, a column uncapped with pride,
If we sing the deed that was sown like seed when..."></div>
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