Common Good Collective

On Liberty and Slavery”

George Moses Horton was born the property of William Horton and his tobacco plantation in 1798. After teaching himself to read, a love for poetry blossomed. First, lines sprouted leaves in his mind, and then they grew into flowering buds that he sold to University of North Carolina students at the Chapel Hill farmers market. Finally, after gaining the attention of a novelist and professor’s wife, Horton’s produced it’s first mature fruit, a published collection of poetry entitled The Hope of Liberty (1829). Though he made enough money from this first volume to purchase his freedom, he was forced to remain in chains for another 30 years, He finally experienced liberty for himself the age of 68 with the end of the Civil War. He settled in Philadelphia, where he enjoyed his freedom until his death 17 years later.

On Liberty and Slavery
By George Moses Horton

Alas! and am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss,
Through hardship, toil and pain!

How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain—
Deprived of liberty.

Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief
This side the silent grave—
To soothe the pain—to quell the grief
And anguish of a slave?

Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound,
Roll through my ravished ears!
Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,
And drive away my fears.

Say unto foul oppression, Cease:
Ye tyrants rage no more,
And let the joyful trump of peace,
Now bid the vassal soar.

Soar on the pinions of that dove
Which long has cooed for thee,
And breathed her notes from Afric’s grove,
The sound of Liberty.

Oh, Liberty! thou golden prize,
So often sought by blood—
We crave thy sacred sun to rise,
The gift of nature’s God!

Bid Slavery hide her haggard face,
And barbarism fly:
I scorn to see the sad disgrace
In which enslaved I lie.

Dear Liberty! upon thy breast,
I languish to respire;
And like the Swan unto her nest,
I’d like to thy smiles retire.

Oh, blest asylum—heavenly balm!
Unto thy boughs I flee—
And in thy shades the storm shall calm,
With songs of Liberty!

Source: The Longman Anthology of Poetry (Pearson, 2006). Published online by The Poetry Foundation.

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Why Direct Action?

There are a handful of American essays that become indelible. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is one. It needs no introduction, and demands a regular re-reading.

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

The Six Conversations by Peter Block

In this series, Peter Block offers more context and nuance in his approach to shifting the community narrative. The essence is to invite people to connect using the Six Conversations from his book Community: The Structure of Belonging. The series is also more interesting than a talking head.

The Six Conversations
By Peter Block

Asking for Liberation

Asking for Liberation | James Baldwin | CGC Question App
by Lori D. Wilson

Liberation comes about only through our willingness to do deep, hard work. The effort begins in our interior landscape, breaking the bonds that hold us captive there. As we ourselves are set free, we can turn to the collective work of liberation in our communities and the world.

While many tools help us engage this difficult work, one stands out as especially crucial: the willingness to ask—and answer—powerful questions. As James Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son, “The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion.”

“Frederick Douglass”

Robert Hayden one of the great unsung poet scholars of our time. The Black person to be appointed the Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress — and before that he first Black faculty member in the University of Michigan’s English department — Hayden was as much a liberator as he was an artist. Here he celebrates the life and work of another liberator, Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass
By Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this
beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole,
systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze
alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

This poem has been published by The Poetry Foundation.

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Reader

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.