Margaret Murray Washington, the third wife of Booker T. Washington was a well-known educator and women’s activist in her own right before she married the founder of Tuskegee. She continued that activism during their marriage. The Washingtons gave twin lectures at Old Bethel A.M.E. Church … Read More(1898) Margaret Murray Washington, “We Must Have a Cleaner Social Morality,”
New York City newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune in 1887 called upon African Americans to form an organization to fight for the rights denied them. Three years later the National Afro-American League, became the first black civil rights organization in the United States. One hundred … Read More(1890) T. Thomas Fortune, “It Is Time To Call A Halt”
W.E.B. Du Bois would eventually emerge as a founder of the NAACP, a leading human rights activists and the most important African American intellectual of the 20th Century. However those developments lay in the future when the 32-year-old DuBois gave the closing address at the … Read More(1900) W.E.B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World”
America. Born free in North Carolina in 1854, Price attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he garnered numerous oratorical prizes and graduated as valedictorian in 1879. Two years later as a delegate of the A.M.E. Zion Church to the World’s Ecumenical Conference of Methodism, held … Read More(1890) Joseph C. Price, “Education and the Problem”
Ida B. Wells emerged in the 1890s as the leading voice against the lynching of African Americans following the violent lynching of three of her friends. Beginning with an editorial in newspaper she owned, Memphis Free Speech in 1892 shortly after their deaths, she organized … Read More(1893) Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law In All Its Phases”
Lucy Craft Laney was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1854, into a family of ten children. Taught to read and write by her mother, a domestic worker, she graduated from Macon’s Lewis High School and entered Atlanta University at the age of fifteen and graduated … Read More(1899) Lucy Craft Laney, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman”
In 1894 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin founded the Women’s New Era Club, a charitable organization of sixty prominent black women in Boston. Soon afterwards she began editing its monthly publication, the Women’s Era. Encouraged by the success of the New Era Club and heartened by … Read More(1895) Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women”
Born in Memphis in 1863 and an activist until her death in 1954, Mary Eliza Church Terrell has been called a living link between the era of the Emancipation Proclamation and the modern civil rights movement. Terrell was particularly active in the Washington, D.C. area. … Read More(1897) Mary Church Terrell, “In Union There is Strength”
On November 20, 1898, Reverend Francis J. Grimke, pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., delivered a sermon in which he denounced those African Americans who called for conservatism and accommodation. Grimke vowed that as long as African Americans were deprived of … Read More(1898) Rev. Francis J. Grimke, “The Negro Will Never Acquiesce As Long As He Lives”
Little is known about Reverend D. A. Graham, the A.M.E. minister who delivered the speech that appears below. However the minister’s words were recorded as part of a nationwide protest in 1899 against lynchings of African Americans across the nation. In May of 1899 the … Read More(1899) Rev. D. A. Graham, “Some Facts About Southern Lynchings”
