I See Dead People - Grand Puba, Rell, Lord Jamar

Ohh

(Whipped and hanged)

Whipped and hanged

And didn’t do a thing

That’s the price paid

For the color of your skin

Stole my history

And now it’s a mystery

How can you know where your going

If you don’t know where you been?

(Grand Puba)

Ay yo, shoot off the nose

Shoot off the lips

Don’t let the world know

Black people did this

Keep 'em in line

With the crack of the whip

Teach 'em their history

It started with slave ships

It’s time to look past all that, man please

How many of my people done swung from trees?

How many of my people in the past we lost?

They constantly remind us of the high, of course

But when we speak on it they say that we whining

Snatch your resources down to your last diamond

I do this for my ancestors

Ain’t nobody alive gon' tell me I should let that shit ride

Nowadays the old heads are scared of the youth

Pull the tree from the roots and ya kill off the fruit

I’m so in tune with the universe

So I unify my people when I spit my verse

My melanin underneath my skin

Let me know I was here when the earth begin

(Lord Jamar)

Medgar Evans

Emmit Till

Somebody said let the Black blood spill

In the ghetto we attack that whip

They got a thing called crack that kid

Malcolm X

Huey Newton

Ain’t no need for the Klan

'Cause we do the shootin'

We need to stand for a revolution

Or fall into the hands of a institution

Sean Bell

Timothy Stansbury

Blood fell, same color as cranberry

Every time we lose a man my heart is heavy

Ready to break like a New Orleans levee

And I testified that yes I cried

Over the years some of our best have died

And I poisoned my peers like a pesticide

You can run, but

There’s nowhere left to hide, look

We used to play out in the rain

But now our blood spills down the drain

We kill ourselves with nothing to gain

It’s time to break those bands and chains

I know we got a Black man in the White House

But there’s still Black fans with the lights out

Still got the bad man at the crack house

Sister Prez can you tell me what’s that about?

(Rell)

Oh yeah

Where you been and where you come from

Teach your daughter and teach your son

There’s too many of us we dyin' by the gun

We create worlds when we think as one

(Grand Puba)

Now they changed Egypt from Khemet

'Cause they knew it had Black in it

Tell a bunch of lies and document it

Take history and spin it

Don’t you people know that most of this stuff

Up in this country we invented?

(Lord Jamar)

Yo, same story

Ever since they came for me

And made me change my name

It’s been a struggle

Always forced me to hustle

Time now we change the game

We used to play out in the rain

But now our blood spills down the drain

We kill ourselves with nothing to gain

It’s time to break those bands and chains

I know we got a Black man in the White House

But there’s still Black fans with the lights out

Still got the bad man at the crack house

Sister Prez can you tell me what’s that about?

(Whipped and hanged)

Whipped and hanged

And didn’t do a thing

That’s the price paid

For the color of your skin

Stole my history

And now it’s a mystery

How can you know where your going

If you don’t know where you been?

If you don’t know where you been

Somebody tell me

They wonder why we’re crazy

We gotta get back