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5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Painful Poignant Speeches and a great history., April 21, 2006
Admission: Had this book not been in a Barnes & Noble discount bin I probably would not have purchased it. Had I not, I would have missed a tome that in the words of those MasterCard gurus is `priceless.'
I had expected to use it as a reference, one where I could dip in and out of. Instead, I have read almost every one of the 96 speeches in this excellent work. Gottheimer has set the book out in chronological order, covering not just African-American civil rights, but also Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, the suffragette movement, gays and lesbians.
Rather than taking it in this chronological order, I chose to read it by subject so I read all black civil rights speeches as one block. It has been an eye-opening, hugely instructive history lesson. And that highlights one of the wonders of this book.
It is not just a book of speeches. It is a history book. One of the many lessons I learned: While Martin Luther King can credibly lay claim to being the greatest orator of the civil rights movement, he most assuredly was not the only great speaker.
The anger, the power, the pain, the passion of many black speakers flows aggressively and often poignantly through these pages. Never before, had I appreciated so well, the suffering of the "negro" community, a suffering was not just physical, but also mental. The evil of slavery for many was greater because the family unit was regularly broken up and abused, with the young black girl often never more than a sex slave for her white master.
I never knew:
That the first African American Governor, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback took office, even if in a pro tempore role in December 1872 for the state of Louisiana.
That the Civil Rights act of 1875 granted all citizens, regardless of color, full access to public facilities and accommodation. Mind you it appears the Jim Crow South did not know it either!
That the introduction of the sex discrimination amendment into the 1964 Civil Rights Act happened only because Congressman Howard Smith introduced it, believing that this amendment would scupper the whole Civil Rights bill. Gosh, who would have thought politicians could be so devious?
I have often thought that much of Jesse Jackson's speechmaking is clich?d but some of his phrasing and imagery when he spoke at the 1984 Democratic National Convention is absolutely superb.
"My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised."
Or
"America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt."
Gottheimer does not present Jackson's speech to the 1988 Democratic Convention where he used similar imagery. Good communicators know what works and as Martin Luther King showed often, are not afraid to repeat strong phrases in many different speeches. In '88, Jackson said,
"America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth. When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina and grandmama could not afford a blanket, she didn't complain and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth -- patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack -- only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn't stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt."
One of the compelling aspects of the book is how history's so called "second-class citizens" - Blacks, Women, Chinese-Americans, Gays, Hispanics were able to overcome similar prejudice to build better futures for themselves. No one should believe that complete success has been achieved.
Bill Clinton's speech to African-American ministers at the Church of God of Christ, in Memphis in 1993 rebukes their community for in a sense swapping one form of tyranny for another. He imagined what Dr. Martin Luther King might say if he were to return. King might have said "I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do."
Gottheimer (who was a Clinton speechwriter) indicated that Clinton did this speech almost extemporaneously, relying on some hand written notes. If so, kudos to a great communicator who by the way writes the foreword to Ripples of Hope. Kudos also to Gottheimer for putting this great edition together. I am boring people telling them how good it is.
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