Say It Plain, Say It Loud
This website contains audio recordings and background on a century of great African American speeches from American Radio Works. Listen to selections below, or view the archive here.

"The Ballot or the Bullet" became one of Malcolm X's most recognizable phrases, and the speech was one of his greatest orations. Two thousand people – including some of his opponents -- turned out to hear him speak in Detroit.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875 - 1955) was a prominent educator and leading civil rights figure in the New Deal era.

Watch Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his historic "I Have a Dream"  speech.

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Context and Commentary

This resource from the History Channel explores the context and impact of Martin Luther King's most famous speech.

Learn about the political and social context behind Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream" speech, the rhetorical devices that helped its concepts resonate, and its effect on the broader Civil Rights Movement.

A Deeper Dive: More on MLK and his greatest speeches

More audio, video, and analysis of MLK's impact on American society can be found at Syracuse.com's 7 Speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. That Stand the Test of Time.

American Rhetoric provides video and audio of many great speeches.

Click here for audio, video, and print transcripts of their Top 100 speeches.

Here are two:

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
("... a day which will live in infamy...")

delivered 8 December 1941, Washington, D.C.

Full text of Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech (Declaration of War)

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Lou Gehrig

Farewell to Baseball Address
("... I consider myself the luckiest man in the world...")

delivered 4 July 1939, Yankee Stadium, New York

Full Text of Lou Gehrig's Farewell to Baseball speech.

Steve Cohen of the Harvard Extension School's Professional Development Programs says, "Make your speech all about the audience."

He also recommends Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking. 

Every Thursday night, PBS NewsHour profiles people and their passions in the series Brief but Spectacular. Creator Steve Goldbloom and his producing partner Zach Land-Miller wanted to find a new way to share original voices the public might otherwise not see.

The funniest TED Talks

Topics include Replying to SPAM emails and A Highly Scientific Taxonomy of Haters

President Lincoln delivered the 272 word Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

A Deeper Dive
See the document in its original form.
View the full Gettysburg Address exhibit at the Library of Congress.