TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF THE NEGRO RACE, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, WITH THE HOPE THAT IT MAY HELP INSPIRE THEM WITH A BELIEF IN THEIR OWN POSSIBILITIES
Copyright
Introduction to the Dover Edition copyright 2000 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.
Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2000, is an unabridged, slightly altered republication of the work originally published in 1914 by Bookery Publishing Company, New York, under the title Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the Days of Slavery to the Present Time. The Introduction to the Dover Edition was written by Dr. Manning Marable for the Dover edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Masterpieces of Negro eloquence
Masterpieces of Negro eloquence, 18181913 / edited by Alice Moore Dunbar; introduction by Manning Marable.
p. cm.
Slightly altered republication of: Masterpieces of Negro eloquence. New York:
Bookery Pub. Co., 1914.
Includes index.
9780486149745
1. Speeches, addresses, etc., AmericanAfro-American authors. 2. Afro-AmericansHistorySources. 3. Afro-American orators. I. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore, 18751935. II. Title.
PS663.N4 M37 2000
815.0080896073dc21
00-022574
Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501
Introduction to the Dover Edition
MASTERPIECES OF NEGRO ELOQUENCE was first published in 1914. Its editor, Alice Moore Dunbar, was widely known among black Americans as a short-story writer, poet, educator, and public speaker. The volume, now republished as a Dover edition, with an enhanced index, is an important collection of the ideas and opinions of influential African-American leaders, covering nearly a century, from 1818 to 1913. Other anthologies of essays and speeches by African Americans may have had greater influence when they first appearedcertainly this was true of Alain Lockes classic volume, The New Negro, published eleven years after Dunbars book. Yet despite some important limitations and contradictions, Masterpieces is a remarkable resource for understanding the life of the mind of black America, and the power of its oral tradition. The volume defines a set of critical issues that framed the context of the black experience in the 19th and early 20th centuries: slavery, emigration to Africa, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation.
Alice Moore was born in New Orleans in 1875. At the age of twenty she had published her first volume of short stories, Violets and Other Tales (1895). A second volume of stories, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, appeared in 1899. She lived for a time in Brooklyn, where she assisted African-American social reformer Victoria Earle Matthews to establish the White Rose Mission. She also became very active in the National Association of Colored Women. After her marriage to the prominent African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the couple lived in Washington, D.C., for several years. Paul Laurence Dunbar died in 1906, at the age of thirty-four. Alice Moore Dunbar then settled in Wilmington, Delaware, serving as an English instructor and administrator at a local high school. She cultivated a polished and effective speaking style, and became a popular lecturer at public events in the black community.
By 1913 Dunbar had developed a professional relationship with Robert J. Nelson, a journalist and publisher. Both contributed to the establishment of the Douglass Publishing Company, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Nelson served as president of the small press, and Dunbar was editor in chief. It was through this publishing house that Dunbar solicited contributions for Masterpieces . In her correspondence to potential contributors, Dunbar described the proposed volume as a collection of the greatest speeches delivered by members of our race... to put... into the hands of every patriotic, race-loving Negro in the country. The larger purpose of the collection was to serve as an inspiration to the rising generation by causing them to reflect on the eloquence of their own great men. In organizing the volume, Dunbar received invaluable assistance from Arthur Schomburg, the black Puerto Rican intellectual and noted bibliophile. Schomburg loaned Dunbar a number of books and manuscripts, and identified potential contributors.
Dunbars hopes that Masterpieces would be a critical and financial success were not realized. Apparently, Dunbar and Nelson lost several thousand dollars on the venture. The business partners were married two years after the publication of the book. Dunbar-Nelson continued to publish poetry, essays, and short stories. In 1920, she published a collection of her prose and poetry, entitled The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer. Decades after Dunbar-Nelsons death, her diaries revealed that she was involved in lesbian relationships during the 1920s and 1930s. The diaries provide important new insights into Dunbar-Nelsons public and private life.
Dunbar finished the work of compiling and editing the speeches by October 1913. The books 51 selections cover a period of almost a century, but more than half of the speeches were written in the period from 1901. to 1913. The historical background for the majority of the speeches was Jim Crow segregation, the American version of racial apartheid. During this oppressive period, the legislative accomplishments of Reconstruction, which had guaranteed civil and political rights to African Americans, were largely eliminated. In the 1880s, Southern states began to pass local legislation restricting the access of black people to hotel accommodations, public transportation, and schools. In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new state constitution that effectively disfranchised black voters. Other southern states soon enacted similar legislative and constitutional provisions outlawing blacks from public life. A network of state-supported but racially segregated colleges for African Americans was developed, featuring curricula focusing on agricultural and vocational education. However, African-American skilled workers, such as brick masons, plumbers, and carpenters, routinely were denied employment solely on the grounds of race. Behind all of these new manifestations of racial discrimination was the omnipresent specter of violence. Several thousand black people were lynched in the South between 1890 and 1910. Hundreds of black-owned businesses were torched and destroyed. At the national level, even the traditional allies of the black community, such as white philanthropies in the North and the Republican Party, retreated in the face of aggressive white supremacy.
For all practical purposes, black Americans as a group were isolated and under siege, without any realistic prospects for maintaining a strong political voice. Turning inward, African Americans began to cope with their difficult situation by a series of defensive steps designed to preserve their socioeconomic institutions and communities. In 1887, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-black town, was established; soon it was followed by other segregated settlements. Jim Crow segregation proved to be simultaneously a curse and a perverse blessing, in that racial restrictions that forced blacks to the margins of white society also created small markets that could support Negro enterprises. Black-owned banks, grocery stores, funeral parlors, and barber shops soon proliferated inside black areas, serving and sustained by the African-American consumer market. A vigorous black press emerged in major cities throughout the country. In 1900, the National Negro Business League was formed, linking hundreds of black merchants in a kind of segregated chamber of commerce.