Selected Speeches
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1884-1915
- Language
- English
- Length
- Short · 80 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Approachable1 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendUp from SlaveryPenguin Classics, 1986Washington's autobiography prints the Atlanta address in full; his other speeches are collected in E. Davidson Washington's Selected Speeches of 1932.
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Washington, born in slavery in Virginia and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, was the most prominent Black American speaker of his generation. His best known address, at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition in September 1895, urged Black Southerners to cast down their buckets where they were in agriculture and the trades, and offered white Southerners a compromise in which social separation would be accepted in return for economic opportunity. Other speeches make the case for industrial education, thrift and property as the road to civil rights, a position W. E. B. Du Bois attacked in The Souls of Black Folk.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Selected Speeches are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
