The Summer of '64

The buildings echo with the chant of our drums The voice of our people, the cries of our sons And the buildings are home to us, through thick and thin And decades, scores, centuries in But leave us homeless, and we will rise Leave us helpless behind your guise For we do see what it is you hide Believe we're animal but for a surmise Yet here were are, in a smoldering city Demanding changes, and simply no pity For if you had never had absolute power We, to this day, would still know a boy named Powell Hold out injustice, and we will speak Until change reaches it's final peak We will run, break, and catechize Until we know we have opened your eyes And here we march, we march in our city Around our buildings, so tall and pretty Here in Harlem, we march for a boy A boy with a future so impressionable and coy In our parade you feel our pride Flowing through us, side by side And what you see is not what you get We walk for a family who cries and frets In our riots of nineteen sixty-four We know for a fact this will go down in lore See, this boy named Powell was of colored race And in your eyes, he had no place In the summer of nineteen sixty-four You hurt us to the very core And blamed it on a simple knife And nothing more but a stereotype In the summer of nineteen sixty-four We couldn't believe it for a second more So we take the streets, as you took his life A life full of potential, success and strife In the summer of nineteen sixty four We walk in Central Park to mourn And walk right through the scorching heat With our steps supervised by a haunting fleet But some of us walk up to the rooftops And scream and riot nonstop For an injustice overlooked far too long We just ask that you right your wrong Yet within the stomping, within the beats There is something that we will reach Change, change, change, and more In the summer of nineteen sixty four