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A Poem in Celebration of Black History
Russell D. Pierce
Our Arrivals Here
Honoring the Legacy of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.
Acknowledgement is given especially to State Senator Chang-Diaz for attending this program and for describing
the narrative poem as epic.
Special thanks also is extended to those invitees who could not make the Program this year including supporters
Mayor Walsh, State Representative Fox and State Representative Carvalho and City Councilor Jackson
A POETIC NARRATIVE PREPARED ESPECIALLY UPON REQUEST AND IN
RECOGNITION OF THE PEER COMMUNITY
Director
Office of Recovery and Empowerment
January 2015
Ancient Kingdoms, Ghana, Songhai, Ethiopia, and Kush, Mali too
A remarkable people, great civilization prior to the America’s captured
we were, stories told by griots of our spirits, the heavens, but the
ground too, before the Greeks, we schooled, abundantly blessed with
resources, copper, zinc, coffee—commerce before shipped to these

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shores, The Middle Passage, rebellion in the Americas, Nat Turner,
Toussaint L’Overture, P.B.S Pinchback, Reconstruction, the War
Between the States, our Christology, our AME, our normal schools, our
redemption, our Tuskegee, our Ben Carlson, our Althea Gibson, our
Cleaver, our Ali, our Phyllis Wheatley, our Hiram Revels, our Judge
Motley and Thurgood Marshall, Higginbotham, our W.E.B. Du Bois, our
explorers, Henson, our singers, Leontyne Price, Ella, our Renaissance,
our Ossie and Ruby Dee
Oh, no Oh, yes
The children have assembled
The old have gathered here
And all the family
The congregants set quietly
Historians would write, John Hope Franklin, intellectuals would
challenge, W.E.B. Du Bois, and orators would sit besides presidents,
Frederick Douglass, and entertainers would create artistry out of
confusion, Josephine Baker

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All this so that we could be recognized for bringing meaning and dignity
to the institutions of American civilization
And not to become as we celebrate this day a negligible factor in the
history of the world, so Carter G. Woodson, believed
In their pews, oh yes The men, kneel
Oh, no The children
mourn
The clouds of our God support such a scene as this.
And yes, strange fruit
Ida B. Well,
Mob,
Protests,
Unrest

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And can’t we get along
Bestowing all manner of glory at the pomp and circumstance
of prayerful supplicants as if service was meant merely to anoint the
saints among us.
Yes Yes
Their souls were lifted by the verses of old field songs, old ditties and
spirituals.
Oh, yes
The hats worn atop coifed heads and long skirts and bejeweled breast
pockets marked the arrival of the usher board, the home and foreign
mission, the Elders, women of the grand masons—the women were a
credit to this institution where all things holy dwelled with it specifically
and in them there was a magnificent and indwelling of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Ghost
Yes Yes
And let the Church say Aman

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Then there was revelation, redemption, the Freedom Riders, the
hatred, the suffering and cries of a still distressed community
There they were too, students, preachers, whites too assembled in the
shock of dogs upon people at the Pettis Bridge, bloody the day was
called and etched in archival memory, yet no mere artifact of the past,
still reflected here
In Watts
In Los Angeles
In Harlem
In Ferguson
Everywhere it seems around the world,
Surmounting apartheid in South Africa; in China at the Square; people
wanting freedom struggle unceasingly for it, risking both life and
treasure

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So we weep, but told not to, for too long, for
surely a Savior shall come; and the day of reckoning will be here; and all
differences reconciled by the mighty hand the Great Councilor.
The Church, the congregants prays for peace, but
Grandmother Ethel stands up for her testimony in the Church of God in
Christ, arms stretched toward the sky, and intones:
“Lord, Oh, Lord, help us in these last and
evil days”
And the congregants say all-knowingly:
“Well, well, well. Aman, Aman”
And the preacher begins with a Word:
“In my Father’s House there are many mansions….
And then I remember as though being awakened again that he really
talking about our ‘freedom’ but as the poet would say in a most indirect
way, not wanting to scare off those outside the group, the ceremony,

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who always wondered when an assembly of ore than two with common
hue gathered—was it a revolt, today a posse, stirring up trouble.
So he was, smiling talking our freedom, our reward in a ‘biblical’ way
And Later we would hear the echo cast into modern parlance:
Freedom Now
The fierce urgency of now
as gradualism is a type of tranquillizing drug, dating back centuries,
expounded by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, but expressed in texts
older than the Bible itself
But, yes Absalom Jones, Allen, Daddy Grace, stand firm
they would implore, stand before God, they would preach, simply stand
As in for something other than self, dare to live, to live
upright, righteous yes, but stand, stand firm
In business and industry we have excelled.
Banneker

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Reginald Lewis
Madam C.J.Walker
George Washington Carver
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Blanche Bruce, too
A people of distinction,
We are.
Words and missional advice to carry on in lands all
over the world, service on earth would be our reward, but a newer
theology served our purpose for today that a servant though we are,
we are more than worth our hire and such was the intent of the servant
woman in witnessing to her white madam
I am more than you hire, Madam

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And let their be much music, rich and high sounding to announce as if
the very coming of the Lord was near—and our stay here at near end.
So let us pray and say in unison at any hint of distress.
Amen.
Jehovah God
Counselor, Most Holy, Sacrifices at altar and state, and yet though
manumitted, still not free—
Tell us why, New Freedom, Old Freedom, Wars to end
all Wars, Underground railroads now underground
economies, Great Migrations, upward North to the Promised
Land.
Push and pull, they say
Redeemer

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Thus are we called here today the suffering and the offerings of the
wounded, on this day we celebrate the establishment of his schools,
great universities and other institutions that marked the history of our
emancipation and the reconstruction of this earth still marred by the
memories not so distant of the cruelest oppression by the hands of
man exercising dominion in the name of the Lord to control all flock,
even though such segregations in voting, housing and employment
bespeak not of the Lord’s House as originally intended, but the
prejudices recalled every day through the remarkable etching of
memory on even the most holy of garments, for nothing can wipe away
such sin, nothing but judgment allows us to think even of joining in
community ever again. Our community and our covenant are with God,
and through Him all things are possible
Yes Reform, Protest, Nat Turner, Vesey
Rebellion, civil unrest too,
Civil disobedience,
Ghandi, King and Messiah, all
She said it was a Christ that taught my soul benighted to understand

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All for my people,
So we hear the poetic thunder of Wheatley,
Brookes, “Let a new earth arise, of men, bold, take hold and control’
Yes
Professing no belief in the righteousness of man, we are careful in
extolling our own virtue, only to say that such long, long suffering is
both unearned and rectified through grace.
So it has been with our faith—a belief in the reality of redemption
unseen as is the power of the Lord in community, unseen, but known
by those who surrender, surrender all and believe
And so sings, Lena Horne, believe
We are marching every day to Zion
Every day to Mount Olive

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Every day to the streets of Ferguson
Every day we give witness to the Lord’s command
To give refuge to the sick
Clothing to the naked
And rest to the afflicted, the infirm and the old
Through our legitimate labor we are heaven bound—though not
averting eyes to troubles here.
Roll, Jordan, Roll
Rivers I have Walked
Amen

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Yes
The choir now stands,
Straight
Poised
Arms stretched outward, heads turned upward in stylish silk
Push, Pull, Strive, Strive, Recovery I now know
And the choir sings
And the minister then delivers the Word
After the Invocation
During service and before the Benediction
There is a type of order, a ranking between the deacon, deaconesses,
the other worthies, the elder church mother, the trustee board and the

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remainder, members, visitors and guests—mainly those who are in fact
the unchurched, the uncommitted in virtue before other witnesses.
And let this be a lesson to you.
But there is room aplenty
In my Father’s House there are many mansions
And there one day I shall live.
But today, before the celebration of my homecoming and transitioning
from under,
I toil,
So I toil,
A servant worthy only of his hire
So speaks the modern world abashed in abundance, material
prosperity.

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Soulfully adrift—those who would protect their wealth against those
who would protect their sense of honor as the duty to do justice and
practice love with one another; those who treat these commands of
the sovereign as nothing more than stylish, almost archaic reminders of
a mere promise—
So how we devalue the Nature, the Creator within us--
Pestilence and disease, foretold, yes, by the
saints and prophets and disciples of old,
Warned we were by elders, statesmen, but oh,
how modern we have become with income, wealth and extravagance
beyond need,
And now, to the Great Virgin Mary, we weep, but
she hears us not, accountable now to only what we have invested, our
hollow selves.
So modern in thinking and so common in greater
virtue by critiquing those who embrace them, bullying young and old as
outdated, out-of-step with trending in fashion, design, selling and
commerce, pulling us further and apart so much so that people cluster

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among their ‘own kind’ calling it affinity, rather than the exclusiveness
it is cloaked in associational preference, choice.
I repeat, pestilence and disease of all kinds, of
heart, mind, soul, spirit.
HIV
The despoiling of Nature—the air, the streams,
the roadways, all polluted and environmental racism, too.
Such fools we are as we seemingly and
hubristically march toward another Armageddon
Thus here now the celebration of a history, that promises so much in its
Charters and Founding Principles, yet that too is marred by the reality
of lawlessness in our own time, by profit over human need and the
extension of both power and arrogance as ladders of arrival and self-
improvement that both the young and old aspire.to.
And yes He walked out onto space and was
lonely and made a world, but now, but now

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All this without attending to beauty that really purifies our souls and
steadies our hunger for more than what necessity would allow. For this
we are hollow—hollow men and women.
Yes
Well
Amen.
To pursue this course of spiritual praise and call it practice through a re-
tooling of Scripture is worse than fire water that has destroyed people
around the world, an act of perversion that distorts the original design
Natives peoples suddenly dicoered
Yes
Yes.
I celebrate history, this day, as it was intended to be celebrated as a
reflection on our past, by doing so, we advance our truth thrust upon
the world, as if to say I am here, was here, will remain here.

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Yes
Well
And that I will not become a negligible factor in the history of the
world.
To all who are gathered, the august, the poor among us, the leaders
and the holy ones too—
Let us pray as we are able
And let us celebrate here the day the Lord has made and awaken our
sense of gratitude for the bestowing of another day to make a
difference—and maybe even wear that Crown, suggesting in the battle
of life, we have sufficiently overcome, but the soul is not yet satisfied—
rested.
Oh, let souls arise
To, Thee, arise

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Oh, what great troubles and trials abound
Here, Africa, Americas, Israel, Egypt,
Palestine, China, Russia and on Downing Street
What relief it will be
When He says as though judgment is near
that, as grandma said:
Enough is enough, and too much is too
much, even for the well-adjusted, the well-heeled and those of us who
are just striving to get through.
Oh Holy divine,
Push, Pull. Carry, Climb
Others, Sisters, Brothers, the world over,
Stand, in recovery too

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In a new unison with all, nature and each other
Amen