3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

H we must die-"let it not be like hops
Hunted and penned in an ingloriow spot,
While round u: bark IM mad and hungry dogs,
Making (heir mode at our accused lot.
H we must die "" oh, Ist us nobly die,
So that our pnedow blood may not be shed
In win; then ewn the monsters we defy
S~ be constrained b horar us Ihouph deed!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe ;
Though far outnumbered, let us slaw us brave,
Md fa Iheir Ihouand blows deal one deeth"Dbw!
What though betas us Nes the open grave?
Like men we'N lace the munieroue, cowardly pads,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
--"H We Must Dfe" by Claude McKay,1922
For much of its history, the southern United States was a terrible and terrifying
place for black people to live . In the antebellum period, slavery relegated Africans in
America to a life under the lash . In the 1880's, white racists engineered and fine-tuned
the mechanisms of racial separation and applied them enthusiastically to black folk in
order to institutionalize inequality ; they also systematized a program of racial violence,
including assaults and lynchings, to insure their place above black people in the region's
social hierarchy . Implicit and extreme violence held the mechanisms of segregation in
place through the 1960's . As one scholar has recently observed, "Negroes were so far
outside the human family that the most inhuman actions could be visited upon them . . .
Black life could be snuffed out on whim, you could be killed because some ignorant
white man didn't like the color of your shirt or the way you drove a wagon ."~
Charles M . Payne, I've Got the Li~h_t of Freedom : The Or¢an^izing Tradt_ion_ and the
Mississippi Freedom Swaale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 15.