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 Crispus Attucks died. | |
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| Shall we take for a sign this Negro slave with unfamiliar name— | 5 |
| With his poor companions, nameless too, till their lives leaped forth in flame? | |
| Yea, surely, the verdict is not for us, to render or deny; | |
| We can only interpret the symbol; God chose these men to die— | |
| As teachers and types, that to humble lives may chief award be made; | |
| That from lowly ones, and rejected stones, the temple’s base is laid! | 10 |
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| When the bullets leaped from the British guns, no chance decreed their aim; | |
| Men see what the royal hirelings saw—a multitude and a flame; | |
| But beyond the flame, a mystery; five dying men in the street, | |
| While the streams of severed races in the well of a nation meet! | |
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| O, blood of the people! changeless tide, through century, creed and race! | 15 |
| Still one as the sweet salt sea is one, though tempered by sun and place; | |
| The same in the ocean currents, and the same in the sheltered seas; | |
| Forever the fountain of common hopes and kindly sympathies; | |
| Indian and Negro, Saxon and Celt, Teuton and Latin and Gaul— | |
| Mere surface shadow and sunshine; while the sounding unifies all! | 20 |
| One love, one hope, one duty theirs! No matter the time or ken, | |
| There never was separate heart-beat in all the races of men! | |
| But alien is one—of class, not race—he has drawn the line for himself; | |
| His roots drink life from inhuman soil, from garbage of pomp and pelf; | |
| His heart beats not with the common beat, he has changed his life-stream’s hue; | 25 |
| He deems his flesh to be finer flesh, he boasts that his blood is blue; | |
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| Patrician, aristocrat, Tory—whatever his age or name, | |
| To the people’s rights and liberties, a traitor ever the same. | |
| The natural crowd is a mob to him, their prayer a vulgar rhyme; | |
| The freeman’s speech is sedition, and the patriot’s deed a crime. | 30 |
| Wherever the race, the law, the land,—whatever the time or throne, | |
| The Tory is always a traitor to every class but his own. | |
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| Thank God for a land where pride is clipped, where arrogance stalks apart; | |
| Where law and song and loathing of wrong are words of the common heart; | |
| Where the masses honor straightforward strength, and know, when veins are bled, | 35 |
| That the bluest blood is putrid blood—that the people’s blood is red! | |
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| And honor to Crispus Attucks, who was leader and voice that day; | |
| The first to defy, and the first to die, with Maverick, Carr and Gray. | |
| Call it riot or revolution, his hand first clenched at the crown; | |
| His feet were first in perilous place to pull the king’s flag down; | 40 |
| His breast was the first one rent apart that liberty’s stream might flow; | |
| For our freedom now and forever, his head was the first laid low. | |
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