Description

Title: Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the Days of Slavery to the Present Time
Author: Dunbar, Alice Moore, editor
Description: 512 pp. Frontispiece of Frederick Douglass. (8vo) red and green cloth. First Edition.An anthology of some 50 speeches, compiled by the widow of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation – “the birth of the Negro into manhood”. Many of the speakers were famous – Douglass, Prince Saunders, Francis Grimke, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DuBois, Henry Highland Garnet, P.B.S. Pinchback, John R. Lynch, Robert Russa Morton, Kelly Miller – but some, found with the assistance of pioneering Black bibliophile Arthur Schomburg – were more obscure and their contributions in this volume are historically, as well as rhetorically, notable – for instance, a 1904 speech on Army training by the Chaplain of a “Buffalo Soldiers” regiment. Mrs. Dunbar, an author in her own right, as well as an active suffragette and political reformer, later edited one of the first literary anthologies of Black writers and poets at the start of the Harlem Renaissance. This earlier work is more scarce.
Heading: (African American Literature)Place Published: New York
Publisher: Bookery Publishing Company
Date Published: [1914]