You can read these lyrics from the song “Afro Blue” (1959), and others by Oscar Brown Jr., in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the lyric in its full context here.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.