Here are some excerpts from historic speeches by African American orators. Unless otherwise noted, all these speeches may be found at www.blackpast.org, an online reference guide to African American history created by Quintard Taylor, a professor of American history at the University of Washington.

1832 - Maria W. Stewart, "Why Sit Ye Here and Die?" a speech in Franklin Hall, Boston, demanding increased educational opportunities for black women:

"Methinks there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance - no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge."

1852 - Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," address delivered in Rochester, N.Y. (available at www.historyplace.com/speeches/douglass.htm):

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."

1865 - Henry Highland Garnet, "Let the Monster Perish," a speech by a former slave, Union Army chaplain and Presbyterian pastor in Washington, D.C., the first African American to speak in the U.S. Capitol, shortly after the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, banning slavery:

"The nation has begun its exodus from worse than Egyptian bondage; and I beseech you that you say to the people that they go forward. With the assurance of God's favor in all things done in obedience to his righteous will, and guided by day and by night by the pillars of cloud and fire, let us not pause until we have reached the other and safe side of the stormy and crimson sea. Let freemen and patriots mete out complete and equal justice to all men and thus prove to mankind the superiority of our democratic, republican government."

1868 - Rev. Henry McNeal Turner, "I Claim the Rights of a Man," a speech by an African Methodist Episcopal minister and a state representative in Georgia on his expulsion, along with all the other black elected officials, from the state legislature by the white majority:

"Though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields and garnered your harvests for two hundred and fifty years. And what do we ask of you in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore for you, for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask for retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our rights. You may expel us, gentlemen, but I firmly believe that you will some day repent it."

1876 - U.S. Sen. Blanche K. Bruce, "Appointing a Committee To Investigate Election Practices in Mississippi," an address in the U.S. Senate calling for an investigation into racial and political violence in Mississippi, and explaining why blacks tend to vote as a bloc:

"The unanimity with which the colored voters act with a party is not referable to any race prejudice on their (part). On the contrary, they invite the political cooperation of their white brethren, and vote as a unit because proscribed as such. They deprecate the establishment of the color line by the opposition, not only because the act is unwise and wrong in principle, but because it isolates them from the white men of the South, and forces them, in sheer self-protection and against their inclination, to act seemingly upon the basis of a race prejudice that they neither respect nor entertain. As a class they are free from prejudices, and have no uncharitable suspicions against their white fellow-citizens, whether native born or settlers from the Northern States. They not only recognize the equality of citizenship and the right of every man to hold, without proscription, any position of honor and trust to which the confidence of the people may elevate him; but owing nothing to race, birth, or surroundings, they, above all other classes in the community, are interested to see prejudices drop out of both politics and the business of the country, and success in life proceed only upon the integrity and merit of the man who seeks it."