If I had a thousand tongues and each tongue were a thousand thunderbolts and each thunderbolt had a thousand voices, I would use them all today to help you understand a loyal and misrepresented and misjudged people.” These were the words of Joseph C. Price, founder and President of Livingston College in North Carolina, who in 1890 delivered an address to the National Education Association annual convention held in Minneapolis. Price’s words reflect on the long tradition of African American oratory. Listed below are some of the most significant orations by African Americans with links to the actual speeches.
Born enslaved in Louisiana in 1847, John Roy Lynch eventually served as a U.S. Congressman from Mississippi from 1873 to 1877 and during an abbreviated term of one year in 1882-1883. Prior to his term in Congress he had served as Speaker of the Mississippi … Read More(1875) Congressman John R. Lynch, “Speech on the Civil Rights Bill”
After the Civil War Frances Ellen Watkins Harper worked among African Americans as a representative of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. From her new position Harper publicized the violence and intimidation in the South directed at the freedpeople. She argued African Americans must organize to … Read More(1875) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Great Problem to be Solved”
Twenty-nine year old John Wesley Cromwell, born into slavery in 1846, was by 1875 an attorney, politician, educator, and newspaper editor, was a rising leader in Virginia’s Reconstruction-era African American community. On August 23, 1875, he addressed the Colored Educational Convention meeting in Richmond. His … Read More(1875) John Wesley Cromwell, “Address on the Difficulties of the Colored Youth in Obtaining an Education in the Virginias”
Senator Blanche K. Bruce, “Speech Before The Senate to Introduce a Resolution Appointing a Committee to Investigate Election Practices in Mississippi,” 1876 Blanche K. Bruce (1841-1898) was the first African American to serve a full term as a United States Senator. In February 1874, the Mississippi legislature elected … Read More(1876) Senator Blanche K. Bruce, “…Appointing a Committee to Investigate Election Practices in Mississippi”
Image Ownership: Public Domain African American intellectual Alexander Crummell was one of the few19th century scholars known and respected widely among European Americans. In an address before the American Geographical Society delivered in Chickering Hall in New York City on May 22, 1877, Crummell demonstrates … Read More(1877) Alexander Crummell, “Address Before the American Geographical Society”
As African Americans increasingly realized that Reconstruction would not usher in permanent citizenship rights and in fact did not protect them from violence, some black leaders began to call for alternative approaches. Not surprisingly a some again urged African American colonization in Africa. In October, … Read More(1877) John E. Bruce, “Reasons Why the Colored American Should Go to Africa”
Peter Humphries Clark, principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, was one of a small number of 19th Century African American Socialists. Grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, schoolteacher and later Principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati … Read More(1877) Peter H. Clark, “Socialism: The Remedy for the Evils of Society“
Today Ferdinand L. Barnett is best known as the husband of anti-lynching crusader, Ida Wells Barnett. However by 1879, Barnett, a graduate of Chicago’s College of Law and editor the Chicago Conservator, the city’s first black newspaper, which he founded in 1878, was one of … Read More(1879) Ferdinand L. Barnett, “Race Unity”
In 1879 an unanticipated migration of nearly seven thousand African Americans from Mississippi and Louisiana to Kansas prompted a debate among national black leaders. Frederick Douglass thought it unwise that black women and men would leave the South. John Mercer Langston disagreed. As in this … Read More(1879) John Mercer Langston, “The Exodus: The Causes Which Led The Colored People of the South to Leave Their Homes – The Lesson”
Between 1879 and 1880, six thousand Exodusters left Louisiana and Mississippi for Kansas. Their migration, prompted by the end of racially-integrated Reconstruction governments, by anti-black violence and by sharecropping and tenant farming, brought national attention including a Congressional hearing, and generated a national debate about … Read More(1879) Robert J. Harlan, “Migration is the Only Remedy for Our Wrongs”
