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.
Image Ownership: Public Domain Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the son of a white Mississippi planter and a former slave, was the first African American to serve as governor of a state when after the governor of Louisiana was impeached, he as Lt. Governor completed the … Read More(1880) P.B.S. Pinchback, “Campaign Speech for GOP Presidential Candidate James G. Garfield.”
On August 15, 1883, Alexander Crummell, founder of the Union of Black Episcopalians and the American Negro Academy and a graduate of Oxford University in England, gave the address below to the Freedman’s Aid Society at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. … Read More(1883) Alexander Crummell, “The Queens of Womanhood”
William Henry Crogman, a native of the West Indian island of St. Martin, was educated at Pierce Academy in Massachusetts immediately after the Civil War. In 1868 he was named to the English faculty of newly organized Claflin College in South Carolina. By 1870 Crogman … Read More(1884) William H. Crogman, “Negro Education: Its Helps and Hindrances”
In an address to women of the graduating class of the Colored High School in Washington, D.C. on June 6th 1884, Rev. Alexander Crummell urges them to put their intellect and their education in the service of racial advancement. The address appears below. Young Ladies: … Read More(1884), Alexander Crummell, “Excellence, an End of the Trained Intellect”
On September 13, 1886, Alexander Crummell preached a sermon at his church, St. Luke’s Church in Washington, D.C. where he challenged many of the prevailing ideas about the importance of classical education. His sermon is reprinted below. That the soul should be without knowledge is … Read More(1886) Alexander Crummell, “Common Sense in Common Schooling”
Lucy E. Parsons was a leading figure in American anarchism and the radical labor movement. Born a slave near Waco, Texas, she married Albert R. Parsons who had become a white radical Republican after serving first as a Confederate soldier. In 1873 Albert and Lucy … Read More(1886) Lucy Parsons, “I am An Anarchist”
In 1886, T. Thomas Fortune, born enslaved in Florida thirty years earlier, was already a newspaper owner and publisher in New York City and author of Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the Old South (1884), the first significant work to argue that … Read More(1886) T. Thomas Fortune, “The Present Relations of Labor and Capital”
Frederick Douglass was one of the few men present at the pioneer woman’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. His support of women’s rights never wavered although in 1869 he publicly disagreed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony … Read More(1888) Frederick Douglass On Woman Suffrage
John E. Bruce, better known as “Bruce Grit” to the public, was described in 1901 as the “prince of Negro Newspaper correspondents.” He was the author of The Bloody Red Record, a compilation of lynchings in the United States published in 1901. However few people … Read More(1889) John E. Bruce, “Organized Resistance Is Our Best Remedy”
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”
