Say It Plain

Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave and a great advocate of antislavery, found his self-image in the language of freedom that allowed him to speak against the bondage into which he had been born. When he was a slave, thirteen years old and living in Baltimore, he happened upon a copy of The Columbian Orator, a collection of historically significant speeches compiled by New England educator Caleb Bingham. Having been taught to read by his master’s wife, who broke both law and tradition in so doing, Douglass found the words in this little book inspiring and empowering. He purchased his own copy for fifty cents and read it over and over, practicing the rhetoric and taking courage from its message. He was especially attracted to a dialogue between a master and a slave in which the slave, after convincing his master to set him free, argued for the God-given right of human liberty and explained how much slaves hate those who withhold their freedom. As Douglass later recalled, “I got a bold and powerful denunciation of oppression and a most brilliant vindication of the rights of man.” It was with this foundation that Douglass felt “equal to a contest with the religious advocate of slavery.” ²

Most slaves encountered the rhetoric of protest in words spoken by community leaders. By the mid nineteenth century, the oratory of the black preacher had become legendary among African Americans, slave and free alike. His message of hope and deliverance, of protest and resistance, served as both admonition and prescription. He spoke to men and women struggling to maintain relationships and to hold families together in the face of overwhelming odds and the unrelenting power of slaveholders’ quest for ever-increasing profit. He spoke through biblical stories of the Israelites escaping slavery to the promised land, guided by wise men and protected by a mighty God. Christianity appealed to people of African ancestry bound in an unchristian-like slavery, in large part because it offered a message of redemption and salvation under the reign of a just God. Empassioned words confirming this belief provided the strength enslaved people needed to hope in the face of the hopelessness.

In northern freedom, African Americans regarded the art of public speaking as a critical tool for organization against slavery and for the establishment and maintenance of civil rights. In the free black communities, black schools and juvenile debating societies prepared young people to participate in the mutual aid and abolition societies. During the 1830s and 1840s, black Bostonians established the Boston Philomathean Society and the Young Men’s Literary Debating Society to instruct African American youth in the ways of public oratory. Similar groups were organized in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and in many other urban black communities. The young people emerging from these groups became the community’s leading voices of abolition.³

The power of the preacher’s message was not only in his words but in his delivery and his ability to draw visual images with his inflection, his cadence, and the tonal and rhythmic quality of his articulation. African American secular speakers were deeply influenced by the preacher’s style, and, like the men of the church, they often moved their listeners as much by the emotional impact of their presentation as by the power of their words. Douglass, who understood the importance of the logical argument, innovative conceptual structure, and the rhythm of rhetoric, was also moved and inspired by the power of good preaching. He understood, as did many who came before and after him, the importance of combining the message of faith and God’s concern for the humans he created with the political messages of organization and alliance-building.

The importance of spoken words that moved listeners to action became the staple of American politics in the years before the Civil War. In some of the most important African American literature of the period, the spoken word often preceded written words. Much of Douglass’s writings came directly from his abolitionist speeches and the stories he told on the antislavery speakers’ circuit. David Walker’s Appeal, the stinging indictment of American slavery and the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders published in 1829 by a black Boston abolitionist, was first a speech that Walker delivered three years earlier before a gathering of the Massachusetts Colored Association, an early black antislavery organization.

These early speeches, as well as those throughout the antebellum and Civil War years, set a standard for those that followed during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. They called to the conscience of the nation, to white America to live up to its creed that promised freedom and equality. They also called to black America to persist in demanding the rights of a free people. The speeches contained in this collection illustrate the range of rhetorical styles and strategic arguments adopted by black leaders over the last century and throughout history. They address the racial issues that have shaped American life and the African American struggle toward freedom. Differences in racial circumstances over time and in various regions of the country have evoked different approaches to protest and a variety of responses to the persistent racial injustice that has characterized American history.

These speeches were shaped by the changing nature of America’s racial climate. Most are easily interpreted, calling out for racial justice and denouncing prejudice and discrimination. A few are more subtle, indicating the pressure under which the speaker was delivering the message. Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise Address,” as his speech at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 came to be known, was an appeal to the white South to continue its dependence on black labor and a call to African Americans not to abandon their Southern homes for the urban, industrializing North. Delivered at the height of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and in the wake of the rising tide of Southern lynching and white terrorism directed at preventing African American political equality, Washington’s words carried the weight of increasing racial oppression throughout the South. He urged black Southerners to settle for social and political inequality in exchange for limited economic opportunity. He assumed that the vast majority of African Americans would remain in the South and would need to reconcile themselves to slow progress within the context of the racial traditions of that region. His rhetoric encouraged blacks and whites of the South not to abandon one another, but to agree to immediate social stability, with the hope of eventual racial reconciliation.

Washington’s message was challenged by other African Americans who refused to compromise their civil rights and the benefits of freedom. Throughout the 1890s the voices of black protest delivered a different, more militant demand for political and social equality. In the summer of 1905, twenty-nine black intellectuals, led by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, met in Niagara Falls, Canada, to draw up a manifesto calling for full civil liberties and the abolition of the Jim Crow system taking legal form throughout the American South. Subsequent annual meetings led to the formation in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the premier civil rights organization of the first half of the twentieth century.

Other twentieth-century speeches were more militant in tone, often reflecting the fact that they were given in the North, distant from the racial violence of the Jim Crow South. Some of the most stinging indictments of racial injustice in twentieth-century America came from Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League. Garvey established the organization in 1914 to work for the worldwide improvement of the conditions of black people. Inspired by Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, and its message of racial self-help, Garvey wrote to Washington, who invited him to visit the United States. Washington died a few months before Garvey arrived, but the Jamaican found broad support for his program, which encouraged independent black economic organization and an aggressive appeal to racial pride. Although Garvey’s tone and his personality differed greatly from that of the more conciliatory Washington, the men shared a belief in a determined use of Americanstyle capitalism as the most effective route to racial opportunity. Chapters of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association sprang up all across the country. By the 1920s it had become the largest mass organization of African Americans in U.S. history. Estimates of its membership range from two to four million. In the speech included in this volume, Garvey issues a call for African Americans to join with the UNIA as a point of racial solidarity and pride. He argued that black people around the world needed a nation of their own, where they could be self-governing and have wide opportunities to demonstrate their abilities and develop their talents.

In 1923, Garvey was convicted—falsely, many claim—of mail fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. Four years later, he was deported from the United States. By that time the tide of civil rights was running against his “back to Africa” program. The voices of black protest demanded equal rights and social justice in the United States. Leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White guided major civil rights organizations, building the structure of the modern civil rights movement that burst on the national scene in the postwar years of the late 1940s. In the North a new group of black elected leaders gained prominence, lending their voices to the struggle. New York representative Adam Clayton Powell became a powerful spokesman for the Harlem community and for urban blacks across the nation. He demanded universal equality of opportunity and recognized the significant role blacks continued to play in broadening civil rights for all Americans.

During the 1950s and 1960s the voices of African America rose to a crescendo. The Supreme Court ruling in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which came as the result of a half century of legal struggle against Jim Crow, struck down the legal basis for racial segregation in public education and paved the way for a broad assault on racial discrimination. In December of 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, led to an African American boycott of that city’s bus system and signaled a quickening of the nonviolent direct-action civil rights movement. It also catapulted a young minister, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., into the national spotlight as a major movement leader. During 1956, the fight to end racial discrimination in public transportation spread to other cities in the South, such as in Birmingham and Tallahassee, where blacks mounted effective campaigns. In all these efforts, the African American voice of protest was critical in rallying support in what, even as recently as the mid twentieth century, was a difficult and dangerous cause. Many blacks suffered the wrath of white resistance to the prospect of the end of white supremacy. In 1956 alone, black singer Nat King Cole was attacked on stage in a Birmingham theater by a white supremacist; the home of Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, and that of Rev. F.L. Shuttlesworth, a civil rights leader in Birmingham, were bombed; and white mobs rioted at the University of Alabama, at Mansfield High School in Mansfield, Texas, and in Clay, Kentucky, in attempts to prevent school integration. As if to encourage such action, one hundred Southern members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives signed a manifesto condemning the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation.

Clearly, there was determined opposition to the movement, yet the struggle for civil rights that had continued since the nineteenth century now moved more rapidly. It became ever more of a national issue as the new medium of television brought it live and often uncensored into the living rooms of middle-class America. Minute by minute coverage gave it even greater urgency and a more shocking impact. Now African American voices of protest were heard across the nation and around the world, making the rhetoric of equality and freedom an especially powerful weapon for civil rights advocates within the context of the Cold War. America’s call for freedom from Communism abroad was weighed against America’s response to the internal demands for racial justice. The ever-present media made it clear that when civil right protestors were attacked by white supremacist mobs, or when Southern law officials denounced efforts to enforce court decisions, it was not done in isolation. At the height of the Cold War, voices from the civil rights movement demanded that America live up to its professed beliefs in human rights, or acknowledge its hypocrisy before the eyes of the world. The bright lights of the visual media changed the equation, and as civil rights speakers painted verbal pictures of their efforts to overcome the forces of white supremacy and to make the basic rights of citizenship available to African Americans in the South, the message carried a credibility as never before, and “the whole world was watching.”

The TV cameras were there in 1958 when baseball star Jackie Robinson, who had a decade earlier integrated the major leagues, joined with African American singer and actor Harry Belafonte and labor organizer A. Philip Randolph to lead ten thousand students in a Youth March for Integration of Schools in Washington, D.C. Two years later, when four North Carolina A&T college students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro to demand that they be served a cup of coffee, the violent response of local whites was also captured for the general TV audience. And as the movement spread rapidly, to Chattanooga, Nashville, Montgomery, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and elsewhere around the South, the student sit-in campaign became a regular major news event, drawing TV viewers and creating a national and international uproar.

African Americans felt that they had lost a powerful friend when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the fall of 1963, but President Johnson’s works and actions in pressing for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act served to reassure many. Obviously the presidential election of 1964 was a critical moment for the movement, and the outcome at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that year was an important test of the new Johnson administration’s civil rights resolve. The integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) appeared before the Democratic credentials committee and asked to be seated at the convention as Mississippi’s official delegation. They argued that the all-white delegation presenting itself to the convention was not representative of the state’s Democrats, since Mississippi blacks were barred from registering to vote by a series of racially restrictive state regulations. African Americans faced racial barriers to their voting throughout the South, but in Mississippi, where only 6.4 percent of blacks had managed to successfully negotiate the obstacles of literacy and citizenship tests, poll taxes, and violence at registration and polling sites, the situation was extraordinary.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, made up mainly of sharecroppers, small businessmen, maids, and schoolteachers, had traveled to the convention by bus, to stay, four to a room, at the decaying Gem Hotel, a mile from Convention Hall, to represent the true Democratic constituency of their state. Most knew that their action would cost them their jobs or worse. That summer, civil rights workers in Mississippi had suffered thirty-five shootings, six murders, sixty-five home and church burnings, and at least eighty beatings. Still, they came to Atlantic City that August, dressed in their “Sunday-go-to-meeting best,” to ask for an official place at the convention.

Among those testifying before the credentials committee on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was Fannie Lou Hamer, a forty-six-year-old ex-sharecropper and one of the oldest field organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the period. She had been beaten and ejected from her sharecropping plantation when the landowner for whom she worked learned that she had tried to register to vote. In a powerful message to the committee, she argued that if the Freedom party was not seated after all it had risked to get to the convention, “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” she asked. Most African Americans shared Hamer’s frustration, and many said so. From the determined message of SNCC leader Ella Baker to Stokely Carmichael’s strident call for black power, the voice of black America refused to be hushed. By the mid 1960s, Malcolm X became a dominant spokesman, especially for young blacks. His appeal was in both his message of black pride and his style of defiance, confronting white authority. Malcolm’s father had been a Garveyite, and Malcolm mixed Garvey’s philosophy with the teachings of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad to indict white racism and those who used it as a weapon against black people. In the middle years of the sixties, black frustration boiled over into the violence of urban riots in Los Angeles; Newark, New Jersey; Detroit; and other American cities. The message was clear. Black America was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

The preeminent civil rights spokesman of the period, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., confronted white American complacency with nonviolent direct action against the most obvious signs of racial discrimination and stirred all America with his powerful rhetoric. King’s last public address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered in Memphis, is one of his most moving, especially in the context of his assassination just hours later. The minister of nonviolence had met a violent death at the hands of a white sniper, but his words lived far beyond his death. For the next two generations and more, his words and those of other African Americans spoke to the conscience of America, appealing to national ideals and confronting the national self-image. In the inspiring words of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, calling black women to continue their traditional role as political organizers and leaders, or those of Jesse Jackson, urging America to “keep hope alive,” or those of civil rights attorney Lani Guinier, issuing a reasoned call for a meaningful conversation on race, African Americans have continued to say it plain, to a nation that often seems bent on ignoring their voices.

The speeches in this collection span the twentieth century and beyond. They are the words of political activists, civil rights organizers, celebrities, and religious leaders, all critical symbols of the centuries-old struggle for American democracy. Here are some of the most important speeches by African Americans engaged in the most critical work that any citizen can perform, their voices a clarion call to the national conscience.