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.
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”
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”
Beginning in 1892 with the destruction of her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, Ida B. Wells for the next forty years was the most prominent opponent of lynching in the United States. What follows is a speech she made to a Chicago audience on the … Read More(1900) Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America”
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”
In January 1901, at the beginning of a new century, George H. White was ending his term as a Congressman from North Carolina’s Second Congressional District. Realizing that he was bringing to a close a thirty two year period when nearly forty Southern African Americans … Read More(1901) Congressman George H. White’s Farewell Address To Congress
Through much of U.S. military history, officers serving in the armed forces have rarely commented publicly on social issues of the day. One exception to this tradition appears below, a speech by Captain Charles Young, Ninth Cavalry, at Stanford University. In December, 1903 Young was … Read More(1903) Captain Charles Young Speaks At Stanford University
Roscoe Conkling Bruce, born in 1879, was the only son of U.S. Senator Blanche K. Bruce and his wife Josephine. He attended Phillips Exeter and graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa in 1902. Bruce became an educator. From 1903 to 1906 he supervised Tuskegee Institute’s … Read More(1905) Roscoe Conkling Bruce, “Freedom Through Education”
On February 13, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at the New York City Republican Club as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln. The speech, which also allowed Roosevelt to expound on his contemporary views of race in the United States, appears below. In his … Read More(1905) Theodore Roosevelt, “Lincoln and the Race Problem”
By 1906 Mary Church Terrell of Washington, D.C., had become one of the most prominent African American women in the nation. Ten years earlier she was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and from 1895 to 1901 she was a … Read More(1906) Mary Church Terrell, “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the U.S.”
In 1906, one year after the Niagara Movement was founded, it held its second annual meeting at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member and its titular leader, gave the address below to the assembled civil rights activists. The men of the … Read More(1906) W.E.B. Du Bois, “Men of Niagara”
