From lust of power and lust of gold, _Great God, deliver us!_ From the leagued lying of despot and of brute, _Great God, deliver us!_ A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance! _Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!_ In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they--did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: _Cease from Crime!_ The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one. _Turn again our captivity, O Lord!_ Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God, it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: _Work and Rise_. He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but some one told how some one said another did--one whom he had never seen nor known. Yet for that man’s crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil. _Hear us, O Heavenly Father!_ Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes who do such deeds high on Thine altar, Jehovah Jireh, and burn it in hell forever and forever! _Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!_ Bewildered we are, and passion-tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: _What meaneth this?_ Tell us the Plan; give us the Sign! _Keep not Thou silence, O God!_ Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely, Thou too art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing? _Ah! Christ of all the Pities!_ Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words. Thou art still the God of our black fathers, and in Thy soul’s soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night. But whisper--speak--call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path. Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and without the liar. Whither? To death? _Amen! Welcome dark sleep!_ Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. Let the cup pass from us, tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is that clamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet shudder lest we must, and it is red, Ah! God! It is a red and awful shape. _Selah!_