Blessed Are Those Who Struggle - The Last Poets, Bernard Purdie

Blessed are those who struggle

Oppression is worse than the grave

Better to die for a noble cause

Than to live and die a slave

Blessed are those who courted death

Who offered their lives to give

Who dared to rebel, rather than serve

To die so that we might live

Blessed are those who took up arms

And dared to face our foes

Nat Turner, Vesey, Gariel, Chinque

To mention a few names we know

Blessed are the memories of those

Who were there at the Harper’s Ferry Raid

Strong were their hearts, noble their cause

And great was the price they paid

Blessed are the voices of those who stood up

And cried out, Let us be free!

Douglas and Garvey and Sojourner Truth

Dubois and Drew All

Blessed are the giants that we have loved

And lost to the bullet’s sting

Like Malcolm and Medgar and the Panthers who fell

And Martin Luther King

And blessed are the bodies of those

Who were hung from the limbs of the sycamore tree

Who found end to their hope at the end of a rope

'cause they dared to attempt to be free

Up through the years we’ve continued this fight

Our liberty to attain

And though we have faced insurmountable odds

Yet the will to resist remains

Blessed are the spirits of those who have died

In the prisons all over this land

Who committed one sin, they stood up like men

And got iced for just being a man

Blessed all you who will join with us now

In this struggle of life and death

So that freedom and peace will be more than a word

To the offspring that we have left