Revealing Speeches by African-American Leadership

Revealing speeches, from 1854 to 2017. And there were a lot of them. This book shares a dozen of those speeches with you with my introspective, retrospective and prospective assessment of each of them. Martin R. Delany is considered by many to be "the father of black nationalism" and when you get a look at his 1865 speech you will see why. And 35 years later W. E. B. DuBois gave a speech, called "an address to the nation" that challenged the black community (and others) to rise up against oppression and tyranny. Then nine years later, in 1909, Ms. Ida B. Wells showed that perhaps she was the bravest of them all. Her editorials against lynching and opposing how white women were given a free pass when it came to charging black men with rapes has gone virtually unnoticed. But as a journalist I can appreciate what she worked to do and the impact she had during her long-time "anti-lynching" campaign. Marcus Garvey, in 1937, demanded that black people stand up and take charge of their lives, as did Malcolm X some 27 years later in his unforgettable "Message to the Grass Roots" speech in 1964. Two years (in 1966) after that Stokely Carmichael was changing "Black Power" during a Free Speech movement speech at UC-Berkeley. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to ever serve in Congress, as she spoke in August of 1970 on the Equal Rights Amendment. The next speech selected comes from Rev. Jesse Jackson, a presentation at the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, California. He ran for President that year and lost, but the nationally televised speech will long be remembered. Bill Cosby spoke at the Temple University graduation in 2012, and represented somewhat of a step back, Angela Davis spoke at the Women's March on Washington in January of 2017 and defended the rights of all oppressed groups, from the LGBT community and women to blacks and Native Americans. The book closes out with a beautiful speech by the former First Lady, Michelle Obama, as she makes a presentation in January 2017 at the National School Counselor of the Year Ceremony. This book is dedicated to ushering in change through knowledge. As former President Barack Obama once said, "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."