History's Greatest Speeches: Women's Voices - Volume II

By Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Peron and Ida B. Wells

The most profound and important speeches ever delivered are here collected in this anthology, featuring some of the most influential women in world history. Fort Raphael Publishing has here collected seven of the most important and iconic speeches of all time, all of which were written and delivered by the most important women of their resp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ft. Raphael Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949661453

Eleanor Roosevelt

<p>Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. She married Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 17, 1905, and was the mother of six children. She became First Lady on March 4, 1933, and went on to serve as Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and Representative to the Commission on Human Rights under Harry S. Truman, and chairwoman of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women under John F. Kennedy. She died on November 7, 1962, at the age of seventy-eight.</p>

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cover-image, History's Greatest Speeches by Women - Vol II - Draft #1

FORT RAPHAEL PUBLISHING CO.

OAK PARK, ILLINOIS

www.AudiobooksChicago.com

Copyright © 2021 by Ft. Raphael Publishing Company

All Rights Reserved.

Edited by Kevin Theis, Ft. Raphael Publishing Company, with assistance from Kelly Silva O’Rourke

Front Cover Artwork and Graphics by Paul Stroili,

Touchstone Graphic Design, Chicago

HISTORY’S GREATEST

SPEECHES:

WOMEN’S VOICES

VOLUME II

CONTENTS

Ida B. Wells - The Awful Slaughter - 1909

Mother Jones - Speech to Striking Coal Miners - 1912

Nellie McClung - Should Men Vote? - 1914

Carrie Chapman Catt - Onward and Upward - 1917

Marie Curie - The Discovery of Radium - 1921

Eleanor Roosevelt - The Struggle for Human Rights - 1948

Eva Peron - Renunciation of the Vice Presidency of Argentina - 1951

IDA B. WELLS

THE AWFUL SLAUGHTER

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was an American journalist, teacher, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and spent her long career fighting against prejudice and promoting women’s rights.

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was freed at the end of the Civil War, but at 16, she lost both her parents and her infant brother in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She and her grandmother labored to support the family and Wells would go on to find work as a teacher and, soon afterwards, became a co-owner and writer for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper.

Wells spent much of her career as a reporter writing about the scourge of lynching. She created a widely circulated pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and became a target for her anti-lynching reporting. Her newspaper office was destroyed by a white mob, but Wells would continue to write, her articles being carried by Black-owned newspapers from coast-to-coast. 

Wells eventually moved to Chicago and remained an activist, writer, speaker and organizer for women’s and civil rights for the rest of her life.

The following speech was delivered by Wells at the National Negro Conference, the forerunner to the NAACP, in New York City on May 31-June 1, 1909.

* * * * * * * * *

The lynching record for a quarter of a century merits the thoughtful study of the American people. It presents three salient facts: First, lynching is color-line murder. Second, crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third, it is a national crime and requires a national remedy. Proof that lynching follows the color line is to be found in the statistics which have been kept for the past twenty-five years. During the few years preceding this period and while frontier law existed, the executions showed a majority of white victims. Later, however, as law courts and authorized judiciary extended into the far West, lynch law rapidly abated, and its white victims became few and far between.  Just as the lynch-law regime came to a close in the West, a new mob movement started in the South.

This was wholly political, its purpose being to suppress the colored vote by intimidation and murder. Thousands of assassins banded together under the name of Ku Klux Klans, Midnight Raiders, Knights of the Golden Circle, et cetera, et cetera, spread a reign of terror, by beating, shooting and killing colored.  In a few years, the purpose was accomplished, and the black vote was suppressed. But mob murder continued. From 1882, in which year fifty-two were lynched, down to the present, lynching has been along the color line. Mob murder increased yearly until in 1892 more than two hundred victims were lynched and statistics show that 3,284 men, women and children have been put to death in this quarter of a century. During the last ten years from 1899 to 1908 inclusive the number lynched was 959. Of this number 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization—the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.

Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily— always the same shameless falsehood that Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood. Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, at