As Granville Ganter, Robert O’Meally, Shirley Wilson Logan, and others have observed, oratory informs Black American public expression in all of its disciplinary and generic diversity. And, as scholars have further observed, much of the Black oratorical tradition is political. In 1925, the Black historian Carter G. Woodson edited a 700-page anthology entitled Negro Orators and Their Orations. Introducing readers to this material during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, whose leaders sought to mobilize the arts in the struggle against Jim Crow and racial capitalism, Woodson quoted Tacitus’s assertion that oratory is the “master of arts” and explained that the orator “is essentially a partisan.” Putting a finer point on the latter claim, he wrote that “[l]iberty, broadly interpreted, may be considered the mainspring of oratory.” Early Black orators like Sojourner Truth, Charles Lenox Remond, and Frederick Douglass had “figured in the physical emancipation of the bondman,” and more recent speakers were pressing for Black people’s “liberation from peonage, their deliverance from caste, and their full incorporation into the body politic.” In the closing paragraph of his introduction, Woodson acknowledged the new Black socialist and communist orators who were not only showing “how human rights are largely determined by the economic rights which individuals enjoy” but also striving “to unite the Negroes and poor whites to make common cause against their foes.”

Comprising three 18-minute presentations (to be followed by 15 minutes of unstructured discussion), this session probes unexamined nexuses of Black political oratory and other literary forms. Marlas Yvonne Whitley charts a Black feminist literary genealogy beginning with Maria W. Stewart’s speech “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?,” which was presented to Boston’s New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. One of the first American women to deliver formal public addresses, Stewart argued forcefully for intellectual training for Black women. She thus anticipated the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” (1848), which affirmed women’s rights to college education and careers in the learned professions, as well as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois’s turn-of the-century debate about Black people’s claims on intellectual labor. Whitley puts Stewart in conversation with The Black Woman (1970; ed. Bambara), an epochal anthology featuring oratory, poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism and theory, and transcripts from Black women’s liberation meetings. Finally, Whitley discusses the persistence of Stewart’s provocations in contemporary Black feminist digital discourse around misgynoir.

Marc Blanc looks at an early episode in the history of Black involvement in American socialism: the work of Black educator, political organizer, and orator Peter H. Clark, who left the Republican Party for the Workingmen’s Party (WP) in the 1870s and twice ran for public office as a WP candidate. Adopting the methods of print culture and editorship studies, Blanc analyzes the reprints of Clark’s speeches that appeared in the WP’s Cincinnati Emancipator in 1877. The editors’ additions and omissions suggest to Blanc that the racial politics of early American socialism will remain only partially understood until scholars consider the “modal translation” of Black-authored oratory into white-edited print. He reads Clark’s reprinted socialist oratory as evidence that the WP was both unwilling to relinquish white abolitionist institutional authority and eager to frame Clark’s Blackness in a way that shielded him from racist attacks. The paper’s editorial interventions, Blanc further contends, obscured Clark’s aim of joining the early socialist movement with the Reconstruction-era civil rights struggle.

Matthew Calihman adds to the small body of scholarship on the cultural work performed by Black elected officials who identified with the Black Power and Black Arts movements. Calihman examines the speeches of Richard G. Hatcher, a member of the first generation of Black mayors of major US cities. In 1968, when he began his first term as the mayor of Gary, Indiana, the city was the state’s second largest and a center of US steel production, and half of its 175,000 residents were Black. Transformed by his campaign into a national political figure, Hatcher moved among prominent Black radical intellectuals. In 1972, he hosted the National Black Political Convention, a landmark Black Power/Black Arts event. And Hatcher himself was a Black radical culture worker. His speeches, some of which were published and broadcasted, narrated his history as a reader of Walt Whitman, Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker, writers who reimagined American political, economic, and cultural democracy and Black people’s relation to it. Hatcher deployed this intellectual autobiography, Calihman argues, to inspire Black cultural identification and political self-determination but at the same time to give impetus to a multiracial Left coalition politics.