Over My Head…

Over my head I hear music in the air;

Over my head I hear music in the air;

Over my head I hear music in the air;

There must be a G-d somewhere.

-Negro Spiritual

Over my head, I heard a certain sound.  But it wasn’t music.  It sounded a bit like wind, a bit like distant thunder.  But unlike the wind, it did not cool my skin, but it gave me chills.  Unlike distant thunder, it did not promise the coming of a gentle cooling rain, but something more ominous and frightful.  Over my head, I heard a certain sound like a restless shuffling.  I heard the sound of spectators in the sankofa section of the cosmos, the great crowd of witnesses, the ancestors shifting in their heavenly stadium seats, some standing to get a better view because they could not believe their spiritual eyes.  Others craning to hear better because they could not believe their spiritual ears.

Over my head, I heard the sound of

Addie Mae Collins • Cynthia Wesley • Carole Robertson • Denise McNair • Emmett Till • Medgar Evers • James Chaney • Andrew Goodman • Michael Schwerner • Ella Baker • Fannie Lou Hamer • Septima Poinsette Clark • Daisy Bates • Rosa Parks • Ralph David Abernathy • Fred Shuttlesworth • Martin Luther King, Jr. • Coretta Scott King • Bayard Rustin • Asa Philip Randolph • Hosea Williams • Crispus Attucks • Nat Turner • Denmark Vesey • Phillis Wheatley • Benjamin Banneker • Richard Allen • Absalom Jones • Gabriel Prosser • David Walker • Dred Scot • Josiah Henson • William Lloyd Garrison • Frederick Douglass • Harriet Tubman • Sojourner Truth • Henry Highland Garnet • John Mercer Langston • Hiram Rhodes Revels • Reverdy Ransom • Octavius Catto • PBS Pinchback • Booker T. Washington • Ida B. Wells • WEB DuBois • George Washington Carver • William Wells Brown • Carter G. Woodson • James Weldon Johnson • J. Rosamond Johnson • Walter White • Whitney Young • Jack Johnson • Marcus Garvey • Langston Hughes • Countee Cullen • Arna Bontemps • Gwendolyn Brooks • Zora Neale Hurston • John Hope • Mary McLeod Bethune • Dorothy Height • Eleanor Roosevelt • Marian Anderson • Billie Holliday • Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. • Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. • Richard Wright • Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. • James Baldwin • Alex Haley • Paul Robeson • Jackie Robinson • John Hope Franklin • Ralph Bunche • Blanche Kelso Bruce • Edward Brooke • Ralph Ellison • Charles Diggs • Harold Washington • Coleman Young • Constance Baker Motley • Shirley Chisholm • H. Leon Higginbotham • Thurgood Marshall • Derrick Bell • Benjamin Hooks • Maynard Holbrooke Jackson • Mack Charles Parker • Lorraine Hansberry • Malcolm X • Jimmy Lee Jackson • Vernon Dahmer • Huey P. Newton • Barbara Jordan • Ron Brown • James Byrd, Jr. • James Anderson

… and hundreds of thousands of others whose names I will never know.  I heard them stand up, inch closer, turn in their seats to see if they heard correctly, that an African-American pastor said he would stay. home. on. election. day. rather than vote for the first African-American incumbent president, or for his opponent, because the President has stated his personal belief that all persons under the Constitution of the United States of America should have the same access to marriage, regardless of whether their intended spouse is of the same or of different gender.

Over my head, I hear these ancestors saying, “WE DID NOT GIVE OUR LIVES FOR THIS.”