Mourn Not the Dead
The intersection between African American sacred music and the labor movement in this country is one of the areas I’m exploring as I research Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement. Spirituals quickly found their way into the brave labor actions of the first part of the 20th century, during a time when the wholesale slaughter of workers and activists was sanctioned by Big Business and Big Government alike.
One of the heroes of the labor movement was Ralph Chaplin, a brilliant labor activist, writer, and artist. It is Chaplin who pens the lyrics for the famed union anthem ”Solidarity Forever,” for instance.
It is in the pages of Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology* — where I found numerous examples of old spirituals transformed into stirring labor songs — that I encountered this lovely, heart-breaking poem by Chaplin, written while unjustly imprisoned, following the officially sanctioned murder of yet another labor activist:
Mourn Not the Dead
Morn not the dead that in the cool earth lie/Dust unto dust/The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die/As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell/Too strong to strive/Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell/Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng/The cowed and the meek/Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong/And dare not speak!
* Industrial Workers of the World (or the “Wobblies”), “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”