O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our ears 
     a-hungered in these fearful days — 
          Hear us, good Lord! 

Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt, are made a mockery in 
     Thy sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy heaven, O God, crying: 
          We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord! 

We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men. 
     When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed: curse them 
          as we curse them, do to them all and more that ever they have done to 

innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home. 
     Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners! 

And yet whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed them
     in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched their 
     mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime, and 
     waxed fat and rich on public iniquity? 
         Thou knowest, good God! 

Is this Thy justice, O Father, that guilt be easier than innocence, and the 
     innocent crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty? 
          Justice, O Judge of men! 

Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the fathers dead? Have not seers seen 
     in Heaven's halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark amidst the black and 
     rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter forms of endless dead? 
          Awake, Thou that sleepest! 

Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, thru blazing 
     corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle men' of women
     strong and free — far from the cozeage, black hypocrisy and chaste 
     prostitution of this shameful speck of dust!
          Turn again, O Lord, leave us not to perish in our sin! 

From lust of body and lust of blood
     Great God deliver us!

From lust of powers and lust of gold,
     Great God deliver us!

Frorn the leagued lying of despot and of brute,
     Great God deliver us!

A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and 
     Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury 
     filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed 
     silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide 
     behind the veil of vengeance!
          Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!

In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and
     held our leaping hands, but they — did not wag their heads and leer and cry 
     with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they
train
     a hundred crimes while we do cure one.
          Turn again our captivity, O Lord! 

Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God it was an humble black man
     who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told
him:
     Work and Rise. He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but-some one told how
     someone said another did — one whom he had never seen nor known. Yet
for
     that man's crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to
     shame, his children, to poverty and evil.
          Hear us, O heavenly Father! 

Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long shall the 
     mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our 
     hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes who do 
     such deeds high on Thine altar, Jehovah Jireh, and burn it in hell forever
and 
     forever!
          Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!

Bewildered we are, and passion-tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and 
     mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy Throne, we 
     raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen 
     fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers by the very blood of Thy crucified 
     Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the Plan; give us the Sign!
          Keep not thou silent, O God!

Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb 
     suffering. Surely Thou too are not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless 
     thing?
          Ah! Christ of all the Pities!

Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words. Thou art still the 
     God of our black fathers, and in Thy soul's soul sit some soft darkenings of 
     the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night.

But whisper — speak — call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our 
     hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path.

Whither? North is greed and South is blood, within, the coward' end without,
     the liar. Whither? To death?
          Amen! Welcome dark sleep! 

Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. Let the cup pass from
us,
     tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is that clamoring and clawing 
     within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet shudder lest we must, and it
is
     red, Ah! God! It is a red and awful shape.
          Selah!

In yonder East trembles a star.
     Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!

Thy will, O Lord, be done!
     Kyrie Eleison!

Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words.
     We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!

We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little 
     children.
          We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord! 

Our voices sink in silence and in night. 
     Hear us, good Lord! 

In night, O God of a godless land! 
     Amen! 

In silence, O Silent God. 
     Selah! 
 

From David Levering Lewis (Ed.) W.E.B. DuBois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), pp. 441-445.