Book Review: Say It Loud: Great Speeches On Civil Rights And African American Identity
by Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith
Publication Date: Aug 31, 2010
List Price: $35.00
Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781595581136
Imprint: The New Press
Publisher: The New Press
Parent Company: The New Press
Read a Description of Say It Loud: Great Speeches On Civil Rights And African American Identity
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
"This is the second anthology of great speeches by
African-Americans meant for the eye and ear.
Our first book/CD project, Say It Plain,
chronicled an array of black leaders across the 20th Century exhorting the
nation to make good on its promise of democracy.
Say It Loud is titled after the classic 1969 James Brown anthem "Say It
Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud." This anthology is meant to illuminate the
evolution of ideas and debates pulsing through the black freedom struggle
from the 1960s to the present and the way these arguments are suffused with
basic questions about what it means to be black in America."
—Excerpted from the Preface (pg. ix)
Five years ago, Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith published an
anthology comprised of many of the greatest civil rights speeches delivered
by African-American leaders in the 20th Century [Say
It Plain: Live Recordings of the 20th Century’s Great African-American
Speeches: A Book-and-CD Set], including classic orations
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Thurgood Marshall,
Minister
Louis Farrakhan, Julian Bond and Fannie Lou Hamer, to name a few. Now, the
authors are publishing book number two, but the question becomes, what do
you do for an encore when you’ve already used up a lot of the best stuff?
Well, it looks like maybe you look over to the right, politically, and add
to the mix addresses by some relatively-conservative black folks to feature
next to the usual suspects such as Dr. King,
Malcolm X, Roy Wilkins, Bobby
Seale and Angela Davis. What does it mean when alongside these firebrands we
find the words of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Ward Connerly, who
built his career by appealing not to fellow African-Americans but to
right-wing white zealots?
The text delivers an almost whiplash effect when you go from Malcolm’s
urgent call for the right to vote or violent revolution in "The Ballot or
the Bulle" to Connerly’s Uncle Tom-like, if heartfelt, answer to the
inquiry "Why is this black man leading the effort to eliminate affirmative
action?"
The opus appropriately closes with Barack Obama’s campaign-saving speech
from March of 2008 when the then presidential hopeful claimed he could no
more disown Reverend Wright than his racist grandmother. How historic could
that be if he proceeded to throw his minister of under the bus a couple of
weeks later? It’s like Dr. King changing his mind about his March on
Washington summation about judging people not by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character.
A bonus is that the book arrives with a CD containing excerpts of each of
the speeches except one (Ossie Davis’ eulogy for Malcolm X). Overall, an
alternately worthy and bizarre sequel suggesting we’ve actually arrived at a
post- racial utopia where black liberal and conservative luminaries deserve
equal time.