A blues cries tears of music
in the clear morning air.
White South draws its lash and strikes.
Little black children pass through pedagogical rifles
to their school of terror.
Once inside the classroom
Jim Crow will be their teacher,
sons of Lynch their playmates;
and there will at every desk
of every child that’s black
bloody ink and flaming pens.

This is the South, the never-ending curse of South!

In that Faubus-world,
beneath the hard Faubus-sky of gangrene,
a black child is free:
      not to be in school among the whites,
to stay peacefully at home,
      not to walk out in the streets,
to be martyred by beatings,
      not to whistle at a white woman,
to be killed by spit and lead,
      and even to lower his head . . . yes,
      bend his back . . . yes,
      fall to his knees . . . yes,
      in that free world . . . yes,
of which John Foster Stupid speaks from airport to
      airport:
while that tiny white ball,
that pretty, tiny, white, presidential ball
(golf) rolls like the smallest of planets
over fine, stiff, clean, chaste, tender,
sweet, green grass . . . yes!

Now then, ladies,
gentlemen, girls,
old men, rich men, poor men,
Indians, Mulattoes, Negroes, Zambos,
think what it would be:
a world all South,
a world all blood and lash,
a world of white schools for whites,
a world all Rock and all Little,
a world all Yankee and all Faubus . . .

      Consider that a moment.
Imagine for just one instant!