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He was black, and so they killed him.
It doesn't matter what his name was, or where he lived—
What matters is that he was a human being,
And they killed him.
And they went from the lynching tree, and they saw "red" men
living under the sky.
And because these "pure" spawn of a thousand European rapes and mixed
marriages felt themselves superior,
They drove the Indians into fenced prisons and fed them sorry beef.
The Indians were human beings, but the newcomers killed them all the same.
Those who fumed at
No Irish Need Apply
Herded people into Manzanar.
Those who liberated Auschwitz told Americans to stay in the ghetto.
Those who wrote of liberty bought and sold men.
In my veins there is the blood of the persecuted.
So in your veins, and in the veins of every bigoted creature who ever spat on
another color.
For all have suffered,
All have been enslaved,
All have been the wrong kind,
Somewhere, sometime in history.
Though I am a human being it may be that a human being in another place
would wish to kill me.
I fear my fellow men.
The massacres never end.
They are on the nightly news,
And killer and killed look alike to me.
My neighbor may be my enemy;
He may long for a rope on my neck.
Like dogs in famine, we kill or be killed—
But we are not dogs.
We are worse than dogs, for we know the one we kill to be like us—
Formed in the same mold, fashioned with the same limbs,
Blood as red as ours, fears like ours, hopes like ours, dreams like ours, pain
like ours, joys like ours, sorrows like ours, lives like ours.
Human beings, all of them, all of us, killed and killers, brothers who hate.
