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Hubert Humphrey
Born
Speech for a civil rights plank, Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, July 1948
Hubert Humphrey was mayor of Minneapolis when he took the convention floor to back a stronger civil rights plank than party leaders wanted. The speech is short, and its famous call to leave the shadows of states' rights for "the bright sunshine of human rights" arrives as the climax of a careful political argument. The plank barely passed, and the whole Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama's walked out; days later the rebels nominated Strom Thurmond on a States' Rights ticket. It is the earliest speech here and shows the fight inside a governing party, years before Montgomery.
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Report to the American People on Civil Rights
John F. Kennedy spoke from the Oval Office on the evening of June 11, 1963, after the standoff over two Black students enrolling at the University of Alabama. It is a brief broadcast, and it is the moment a cautious president called civil rights "a moral issue" that was "as old as the scriptures." He told the country he would ask Congress for a sweeping civil rights bill, the one that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just after midnight, Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, which makes this a heavy but essential prelude to the speeches that follow.
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John Lewis
Born
Speech at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963
John Lewis was the 23-year-old chairman of SNCC and the youngest speaker at the march. His draft called the administration's civil rights bill "too little and too late" and was cut back under pressure from march leaders shortly before he spoke. Even softened, it is the sharpest speech of the day, impatient with both parties and with the slow pace of federal protection in the South. Hear it beside King's address from the same podium to understand that the march held more than one mood.
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I Have a Dream
Most people know the last few minutes. The full speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, opens with a pointed argument that America had given its Black citizens "a bad check" that came back marked "insufficient funds," and it presses "the fierce urgency of now" well before any dream appears. Martin Luther King Jr. began from his prepared text and then, by his own account, turned aside from the manuscript and never came back to it. Hearing the whole thing shows how the famous ending grows out of that hard opening rather than replacing it.
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Message to the Grass Roots
Malcolm X gave this at the closing rally of the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, held at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit on November 10, 1963, less than three months after the March on Washington. He argues that a grassroots protest was taken over and tamed by the establishment, calling the march a sellout, a takeover and a circus, and he draws a hard line between what he called the Black revolution and the Negro revolution. It is the most direct rebuttal on this list to the March speeches, and it should be heard right after them.
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The Ballot or the Bullet
Malcolm X first gave this address in Cleveland on April 3, 1964, then again nine days later at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit; the Detroit version is the one some scholars treat as definitive. It came a month after his split from the Nation of Islam, and it is less about religion than political strategy, with voting at the center of the argument. Pair it with Message to the Grass Roots from the same church five months earlier: the same speaker, the same city, and a noticeably different emphasis.
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Fannie Lou Hamer
Born
Testimony to the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, August 22, 1964
Fannie Lou Hamer spoke from memory for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was challenging the state's regular delegation. In plain, steady detail she describes being put off the plantation where she lived after trying to register to vote, and the beating she suffered in the Winona jail, then closes by saying that if the Freedom Democrats were not seated, "I question America." President Johnson called a last-minute press conference that pulled the networks away, yet evening news programs broadcast her testimony anyway. No one else here speaks so directly from what was done to them.
More about Fannie Lou Hamer8
Lyndon B. Johnson
Born
"The American Promise" address to a joint session of Congress, March 15, 1965
Lyndon B. Johnson spoke days after marchers were brutally assaulted at Selma, asking Congress for a voting rights law. A Southern president, speaking in the House chamber, takes up the movement's own anthem and declares, "And we shall overcome." Listen for the long passage about his first job, teaching poor Mexican-American children in Cotulla, Texas, which makes the speech more personal than its famous line suggests. Set it against Hamer's testimony from the year before, when the same president worked to keep her off television.
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Baldwin–Buckley debate
On February 18, 1965, James Baldwin argued at the Cambridge Union in England for the motion that the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro, with William F. Buckley Jr. opposing. Baldwin's speech is the reason to listen: a novelist's account of what it does to a Black child to grow up inside a country's story, summed up in the boy who cheers Gary Cooper shooting Indians and then realizes the Indians are him. The students voted overwhelmingly for Baldwin's side; accounts give the count as 540 to 160 or 544 to 164. The BBC filmed the speeches by both men in full, so each can be heard at length and judged on his own terms, which makes it a rare chance to hear the case argued against an opponent.
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Stokely Carmichael
Born
"Black Power" speech, Greek Theatre, University of California, Berkeley, October 29, 1966
As chairman of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael spoke to a packed Greek Theatre at a Black Power conference organized by Students for a Democratic Society. He insists "we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy," and calls the war in Vietnam "an illegal and immoral war." KPFA radio recorded the speech, and its length matters: the argument about language, power and who gets to define whom is built patiently rather than shouted. It is the clearest statement here of the break with nonviolent integration.
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Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to more than 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, at an event sponsored by Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. It is a long, closely reasoned speech that ties the war abroad to poverty at home and to the young men sent to fight it. The immediate response was largely negative: The Washington Post said he had diminished his usefulness to his cause, and the NAACP accused him of linking two separate issues. Hear it for the King that the quotation calendars leave out. The picture shows him making the same case against the war at the University of Minnesota later that month.
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I've Been to the Mountaintop
King had asked Ralph Abernathy to take his place at the mass meeting at Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, but Abernathy called and persuaded him to brave the bad weather and come. He was there to support the city's striking sanitation workers, and much of the speech is practical: unity, economic pressure and the dignity of the strike. Only near the end does it turn to the mountaintop and the promised land. He was killed less than 24 hours later, and hearing the whole speech keeps the strike, not only the prophecy, at its center.
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Robert F. Kennedy's speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for president, broke the news of King's death to a crowd of about 2,500 at 17th Street and Broadway in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, most of whom had not yet heard. Speaking extemporaneously from the back of a truck for only a few minutes, he mentioned that a member of his own family had been killed by a white man and quoted Aeschylus on wisdom that comes "through the awful grace of God." Indianapolis did not see the unrest that broke out in many cities, though local activists who worked the streets that night share the credit. It is the shortest entry here and the hardest to forget.
More about Robert F. Kennedy's speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
