America has much to be ashamed of.

Slavery first among them

 

Those that fought to end it 

are my heros.

For me they are the 

best of America.

 

I stand with the union

soldiers black and white

at Vicksburg and Atlanta.

I sit with Grant at Appomattox 

To be sure he is not 

Intimidated by Lee’s

Aristocratic bearing.

 

I hear the simple truth

Stated by the abolitionists.

Slavery is wrong and has to be destoryed.

 

I follow Frederick Douglass, an 

ex-slave who insisted that the leadership 

of the abolitionist movement include

African-Americans.

 

I serve Harriet Tubman who conducted slaves to freedom,

and hail John Brown, a white man, 

determined to show the slave holders

that the enmies of slavery would fight.

 

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

But his soul goes marching on.”

sang young men from Minnesota, Massachusetts

and Maine as they headed south to

smash the slaveholding aristocracy.

 

Let us stand with them; all of them.

October, 2019