THE FOURTH OF YOU-LIE (2024) By Kevin ”Rashid” Johnson

You call it independence day
Oh my how you lie
Cuz Black folks were still your slaves
On that day in July

If taxation without representation
Was just cause for outrage
How about being enslaved
>From cradle to grave

To enrich people with our labor
Who refused themselves to work
Babies sold off at a whim
Sleeping in crude shanties lying on dirt

No security no creature comforts
The most precarious lifestyle
White men enter your abode
Take liberties with your wife or child

Our only respite cast our eyes
To the sky
We cry we die
That was our fourth of July

This day you cherish
Elate celebrate
We hate because it was our bondage
That it commemorates

Destroyed families
Bullwhips packs of negro hounds
To ensure we remained in bondage
Trained to run us down

If we even entertained the idea
Of going free
We were stripped and whipped
Bound fast to a tree

And dare we fight back
In an urge to protect
Our families ourselves
We’d be hanged by the neck

In misery unfree
We lived and died
That’s the meaning to Black people
Of your fourth of July

But you gloss over this history
Celebrating our tragedy every year
Like memorializing the Nazis
The analogy so clear

A federal holiday
Fireworks blasts of light
Like the gunfire across the brows
Of slaves daring to take flight

Murder and mayhem being chased
Into the night
For pursuing the independence you now celebrate
That your fathers took as their right

A day to parade about freedom
Oh how you lie
Slavery then cellblocks now
The hypocrisy of your fourth of July