Anthem · Barking Justice Music
Honor: When Sacrifice Outlasts the Nation's Memory
A veterans’ protest anthem for the disabled American soldier, saluted once a year and left to fight for care the other 364.
About this anthem
Still Goddamn refuses to let Selma become a closed chapter. It begins on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and follows the unfinished struggle forward through Charlottesville, the murder of George Floyd, the weakening of voting rights, and political maps designed to diminish the power generations fought and bled to secure.
The Civil Rights Memory Hour exists to break the habit of treating civil rights history as settled, ceremonial, and safely behind us. The struggles of Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery are not museum pieces. They are the direct ancestors of battles now unfolding in courtrooms, statehouses, classrooms, and voting precincts across the country.
Still Goddamn turns that mission into a chorus.
It names the bridge, but refuses to mistake the monument for an ending. It confronts the men in suits and ties who inherited the machinery of exclusion, modernized its language, and learned to carry forward old hatreds beneath the appearance of lawful authority.
What makes this anthem essential to the block is its refusal of comfortable distance. It does not allow listeners to mourn Bloody Sunday while looking away from the violence, racial intimidation, voter suppression, and organized cruelty of the present. By placing Charlottesville beside Selma and George Floyd beside the marchers beaten on the bridge, the song makes its central argument unmistakable: the through-line was never broken. It was renamed, repackaged, and protected by new language.
The anthem closes where the Civil Rights Memory Hour always returns: freedom was never handed down. It was marched for, organized for, voted for, suffered for, and defended by ordinary people who refused to accept injustice as permanent.
Still Goddamn ends with those people building the bridge themselves, from truth, votes, memory, and joined hands, because justice has never depended on whether the powerful were ready to grant it.
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Lyrics
Verse 1
They said “go slow” in ’63, While they buried Medgar by a magnolia tree. They blew up children in Sunday gowns, Now it’s book bans and drag show crackdowns. White robes traded for suits and ties, But we still march while the system lies.
verse 2
They paved that bridge with blood and names, Then crowned it with a Klansman’s fame. Tear down his goddamn bridge of pride— It was never built on the people’s side. You honor John Lewis with empty words— But won’t rip off Edmund Pettus’s hood?
Chorus
It ain’t over, it ain’t done— Still not the land of the equal one. You call it freedom, we call it fear— ‘Cause hatred still holds office here. Still goddamn, still goddamn— From Selma’s bridge to Charlottesville’s clan. Still goddamn, still goddamn— The mask just changed, not the plan.
Verse 3
A Nazi marched in a MAGA hat, Said “Jews will not replace us” flat. They drove through crowds with deadly speed— Called it mental illness, not white greed. They shoot Black teens for knocking wrong doors, But parade assault rifles in grocery stores.
You say progress takes time. But it’s been sixty goddamn years. John Lewis walked that bridge So we wouldn’t have to crawl.
Now they gerrymander his district And gut the law he bled for. Tell me— What kind of democracy criminalizes the memory of its own heroes?
We watched George Floyd beg to breathe, While cameras rolled and cops just seethed. They stacked the courts, then shrugged and said, “Let’s move on—what’s past is dead.” But we remember every name— This blood-soaked soil still bears the shame.
Final Chorus
John Lewis said: “Get in good trouble.” Well, this song is trouble. Because silence is consent— and we’re done being polite to white supremacy in a necktie.
Tear down his goddamn bridge. We’ll build our own— from truth, from pain, from every march that left blood in the stone.
We’ll build a bridge with no name to erase, No ghost in a hood looming over its grace. A bridge made of fists, of votes, of hands— joined in fury, not chained by the past.
Still goddamn, still goddamn— But we turned the curse into a plan. Still goddamn, still goddamn— Now we march with fire in hand.
So tear it down, stone by stone— We’re done begging, we’ve outgrown. This time, this bridge, this dream—our own. Goddamn right. We’re not alone.
Spoken
Barking Justice Music. Fighting for the disabled American veteran.
Related program
Weekend History Block
The Civil Rights Memory Hour
Still Goddamn opens the hour’s argument in full: history is not behind us, it is the mechanism explaining the present. The segment carries this anthem alongside remembrance and moral testimony that traces struggle from Reconstruction to Charlottesville and beyond.
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