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 Frederick Douglass Oratory Contest This December, for the first time, E.L. Haynes students participated in the Frederick Douglass Oratorical Contest. Each year, the competition attracts student orators from around the country. Four of our outstanding fifth grade students represented Haynes - Inaya, Sanjaya, Brendan, and Tasneem. Sanjaya placed second in the elementary category for her oration of an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ “What the Black Man Wants” speech. According to their teacher, Brigham Kiplinger, the students represented the very best of E.L. Haynes. "Our orators prepared tirelessly and performed brilliantly, speaking Douglass' words with passion and conviction.” In preparation for their speeches, the students met with their teacher daily for three weeks. They also studied and practiced at home. Their charge was not just to memorize the speech, but to develop their public speaking skills – from intonation to body language. “The orators conveyed their speeches' meanings and engaged the audience through well-placed emphasis, variations in tone and pace, and expressive body gestures," said Mr. Kiplinger. As a dress rehearsal, each student performed his/her speech at our weekly Community Circle. Students, parents, and visitors listened and then discussed each speech’s meaning and the public speaking skills employed by each student orator. One student remarked, “They said it the way Frederick Douglass would have said it: with emotion. It inspired me to want to give a speech.” What did the orators learn from the experience? “I learned to speak out,” said Inaya. Brendan added, “I learned it takes a lot to be able to recite and memorize a speech. I also learned a lot about slavery. His speech really spoke out to me.” Below are the excerpts our students chose for the contest.
Excerpt from Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. American is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the greatest sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whosejudgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
Frederick Douglass on Lincoln What have we to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what had Abraham Lincoln to do with us? … Though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rages of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and, with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw independence of the black Republic of Haiti, the special object of slaveholding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her Minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the City of Washington; under his rule, we saw the internal slave trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule and inspiration we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slaveholders three months of grace, in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long we saw all this and more.
I am for the “immediate, unconditional, and universal” enfranchisement of the black man, in every State in the Union. Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for, in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society, and holds his liberty as a privilege, not as a right. He is at the mercy of the mob, and has no means of protecting himself. It may be objected, however, that this pressing of the negro’s right to suffrage is premature. Let us have slavery abolished, it may be said, let us have labor organized, and then, in the natural course of events, the right of suffrage will be extended to the negro. I do not agree with this. The American people are now in tears. The Shenandoah has run with blood – the best blood of the North. All around Richmond, the blood of New England and of the North has been shed – of your sons, your brothers and your fathers. We all feel, in the existence of this Rebellion, that judgments terrible, wide-spread, far-reaching, overwhelming, are abroad in the land; and we feel, in view of these judgments, just now, a disposition to learn righteousness. This is the hour. Our streets are in mourning, tears are falling at every fireside, and under the chastisement of the Rebellion we have almost come up to the point of conceding this great, this all-important right of suffrage. I fear that if we fail to do it now, if abolitionists fail to press it now, we ma not see, for centuries to come, the same disposition that exists at this moment. Hence, I say, now is the time to press this right.
Frederick Douglass, 1864 Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone - don’t disturb him - If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go. If you see him going to the ballot-box, let him alone - don’t disturb him! If you see him going into a workshop, just let him alone - your interference is doing him a positive injury… Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice…the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the negro, and established that line for his government. Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man. A great many delusions have been swept away by this war. One was that the negro would not work; he has proved his ability to work. Another was, that the negro would not fight; that he possessed only the most sheepish attributes of humanity; was a perfect lamb, or an “Uncle Tom;” disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him. But the war has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the negro, and that “he will fight … when there is a reasonable probability of his whipping anybody. |
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