It Never Did

The South can’t rise again – it never fell.
It never gave the black folks back the things
It took away, things lost, like dignity,
Security, and freedom just to be.

The South had stolen all they ever had
By simply never granting it to them,
And then enslaving their own white kids’ minds
That what they’d done they had the right to do.

They felt they had the right to never tell
The awful deeds they did to everyone
And cooked the history books to hide it all,
Pretending that they’d lost and given up,
But quietly rebuilding all they’d lost,
Restricting access every way they could
To folks who didn’t look like they did: white.

By flying flags and waving guns, they built
Their horrid practices to make them laws
For schools and restaurants and toilets, too,
To separate their equal attitudes.

The South thus never fell but simply hid
Until it found its new white champion.

Lenhardt 2020