When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful <br />and terrible thing, needful to man as air, <br />usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, <br />when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, <br />reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more <br />than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians: <br />this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro <br />beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world <br />where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, <br />this man, superb in love and logic, this man <br />shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric, <br />not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, <br />but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives <br />fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.<br /><br />Robert Hayden<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/frederick-douglass/
