The March She Would Not Walk Behind (Ida B. Wells)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You counted the lynchings
the country had been committing
while forgetting with the other half of itself —
two hundred a year
in the decade that followed Reconstruction
and the numbers had not been collected
because the collection
would have been an indictment
the government had not authorized
You collected them anyway
and filed them in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors
and the pamphlet traveled by hand
because the mail could not be trusted
with what the mail was built to deliver

[Verse 2]
They burned your newspaper office in Memphis
while you were out of town
and the mob was specific —
they left the type cases
and burned only what was written on them,
which is a specific kind of fire:
it said we do not hate the press
we hate what the press said
You never returned to Memphis
and the ashes smelled like hot lead
and the particular chemistry
of a typesetter's room
that had been naming names
until the names named it back

[Chorus]
They held a suffrage march in Washington
and told the Black women to march in the back
so as not to lose the Southern delegates
and you waited in the crowd
and the crowd thinned
and the march began
and you stepped out and joined your state's delegation
in the front
where the state had registered you
and the photographs show you
between two white women
who had agreed to walk with you
and the photographs do not show
the organizer who had asked you to fall back
because the photographs do the work
the asking had forgotten to authorize

[Outro]
You lived in Chicago for the rest of your years
and co-founded the organization
that would outlive every organization
it had been founded to oppose,
and died in 1931 of kidney failure at sixty-nine
and the Pulitzer came for you in 2020 —
eighty-nine years after the deadline —
and the deadline was the argument
the prize committee had been failing to meet
for as long as the prize
had been refusing to correct the file
and the file was corrected
which is the only posthumous victory
the dead have ever authorized the living
to claim on their behalf