100% of proceeds from the download of this song will be donated to YOUth Speak Justice in perpetuity. YOUth Speak Justice is an organization founded and led by youth from Glynn County, Georgia in response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Their mission is to engage young people in social justice work and community lead activism, and to amplify the critical role our youth can play in the fight to dismantle systemic racism. To learn more about the work of YOUth Speak Justice, please visit www.youthspeakjustice.org
ABOUT GLYNN COUNTY
This project was a collaboration between three friends — a white woman, a Black man, and a white man — all of whom have lifelong ties to Glynn County, Georgia. The song was written in the wake of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who lived and died in Glynn County. His killers were white; one a retired police detective. Coincidentally, the song was composed in what would be the last twenty-four hours of the life of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The song was intended to present a critical examination and indictment of a culture that is pervasive throughout the South, and shamefully exemplified in our home community: a culture of complacency, complicity, and silence in the glaring face of generational, systemic racism and institutionalized violence against our Black neighbors. Indeed, against ourselves, the community, and the life in it.
To accompany the song, we endeavored to create a vision of life in this region; one that illustrates how racism, white supremacy, and inequity are woven into the backdrop of daily life in the South specifically, and in the United States more broadly. This video was shot in the summer of 2020, on location in Glynn, McIntosh, and Chatham Counties in Georgia. It was neither staged nor scripted. It rather shows everyday moments in a state that has had more lynchings of Black people than nearly any other state in the nation from the Civil War until the present. Until June 2020, Georgia lacked legislation for hate crimes.
This song will not be made available on any streaming platforms. Instead, it will be available for download by donation only at www.elliperry.com. 100% of its proceeds will be donated to YOUth Speak Justice in perpetuity. YOUth Speak Justice is an organization founded and led by youth from Glynn County, Georgia in response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Their mission is to engage young people in social justice work and community lead activism, and to amplify the critical role our youth can play in the fight to dismantle systemic racism. To learn more about the work of YOUth Speak Justice, please visit www.youthspeakjustice.org
"Glynn County" was recorded and filmed on occupied Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kickapoo, Wichita, Muscogee (Creek), and Yamassee Territory, and focuses on the region that comprises the ancestral home of the Gullah-Geeche.
Where I come from the wind won't lend you breath
Sticking to your lung like blood sticks to the pavement
And where I come from sometimes they kill a man
for running through the streets where he lives while being Black
Cut into a Southern heart like splitting seams
Go and call the law man, here he come with all his friends and their enmity
Well I've never seen a strange fruit swinging from a Southern tree,
but I seen a pig wearing blue pull a gun on a Black boy just for talking to me
Tell me what is the price for being silent while people die?
Back across the causeway all is not as it seems,
the quiet from the east carves out a hollow sound, and it is deafening
Standing your ground, screaming about your rights,
throwing up a first clenched tight around hate you try to deny
Tell me what is the price for being silent while people lie?
And if the cost of being Black down here is a life,
then tell me the price of being silent while being white.