Speech Time Frame: 1878-1900
(1893) Frances E.W. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future”
On May 20, 1893, women’s activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper gave this speech before the World’s Congress of Representative Women,...
(1898) Booker T. Washington, “The Madison Square Garden Address”
After his 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech, Booker T. Washington’s popularity grew rapidly among Northern whites. In this instance he gives...
(1896) Hugh M. Browne, “The Higher Education of the Colored People of the South”
Hugh M. Browne, educator, Presbyterian minister, and college professor in Liberia, positioned himself between the advocates of industrial and higher...
(1896) Booker T. Washington, “Address to the Harvard Alumni Dinner”
Image Ownership: Public Domain One year after his Atlanta Compromise Speech 40-year-old Booker T. Washington was on his way to...
(1898) Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women”
Mary Church Terrell, the daughter of former slaves, became by the beginning of the 20th century one of the most...
(1883) Alexander Crummell, “The Queens of Womanhood”
On August 15, 1883, Alexander Crummell, founder of the Union of Black Episcopalians and the American Negro Academy and a...
(1880) P.B.S. Pinchback, “Campaign Speech for GOP Presidential Candidate James G. Garfield.”
Image Ownership: Public Domain Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the son of a white Mississippi planter and a former slave, was...
(1879) John Mercer Langston, “The Exodus: The Causes Which Led The Colored People of the South to Leave Their Homes – The Lesson”
In 1879 an unanticipated migration of nearly seven thousand African Americans from Mississippi and Louisiana to Kansas prompted a debate...
(1900) Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America”
Beginning in 1892 with the destruction of her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, Ida B. Wells for the next forty...
