CULTURETECHLENSSpeeches
Great Black speeches in full text — every one public domain, every one carrying its evidence card: speaker, date, occasion, source, rights basis, citation. That is the standard this section publishes under, and it is why this page opens the way it does:
Holdings today: no speech texts yet. CultureTechLens does not hold a speech collection, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The section is being built from the public-domain lane — pre-1930 published speeches and United States federal works, Black Chicago nexus first — starting with the items specified below. Each item names its rights basis and the authoritative edition its text will be collated against; an item is published only when its full text has been ingested and checked complete against that edition. Abridged web copies do not clear the bar.
Two exclusions are policy, stated plainly: the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are copyrighted by his estate and will not be reprinted here without a license; and municipal addresses are not automatically public domain — only federal works are — so every non-federal item’s rights are verified individually before it is specified.
Specified — in acquisition
Frederick Douglass — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Delivered: July 5, 1852 — Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society
Occasion: Independence Day celebration address
First publication: Published 1852 (Rochester, N.Y.)
Rights basis: Public domain — published 1852; author died 1895.
Authoritative source: Project Gutenberg full text; Library of Congress holds Douglass papers and the printed oration.
Status: SPECIFIED — text not yet ingested. Collate the Gutenberg text against a scholarly edition; the oration is long (~10,000 words) and most web copies are abridged excerpts — completeness must be checked, not assumed.
Booker T. Washington — “Atlanta Exposition Address”
Delivered: September 18, 1895 — Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia
Occasion: Opening-day address, as a representative of the Negro race (the exposition's own framing)
First publication: The address as printed in Up From Slavery (1901), ch. 14, 'The Atlanta Exposition Address'
Rights basis: Public domain — published 1901; author died 1915.
Authoritative source: Documenting the American South (DocSouth), University of North Carolina — First-Person Narratives collection, Up From Slavery electronic edition.
Status: SPECIFIED — text not yet ingested. Transcribe the address portion of ch. 14 from the DocSouth edition; the chapter's framing narrative is Washington's later commentary and is labeled as such, not folded into the address.
Ida B. Wells — “Lynching, Our National Crime”
Delivered: 1909 — National Negro Conference, New York (the conference that led to the founding of the NAACP)
Occasion: Address to the National Negro Conference
First publication: Published in the conference proceedings, 1909
Rights basis: Public domain — published 1909; author died 1931, and the work was published in her lifetime before 1930.
Authoritative source: Proceedings of the National Negro Conference, 1909 (HathiTrust full view).
Status: SPECIFIED — text not yet ingested. Locate the proceedings text (HathiTrust) and collate against a second printing before publication; Wells's lifetime publications before 1930 are the public-domain lane the inventory names.
Oscar De Priest — “Speeches and Remarks in the Congressional Record”
Delivered: 1929–1935 — floor speeches and remarks in the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.
Occasion: Chicago nexus: Oscar De Priest was Chicago's congressman from 1929 — the first African American congressman from a Northern state
First publication: Congressional Record (U.S. Government Printing Office)
Rights basis: Public domain by statute — works of the U.S. federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).
Authoritative source: Congressional Record via govinfo / Congress.gov.
Status: SPECIFIED — item-level selection pending. Item-level selection pending research: identify the specific De Priest speeches to publish (anti-lynching and the 1934 House-restaurant desegregation petition among them), pull the Record pages from govinfo, and publish each as its own item with its date and Record citation.
Listening
When a recording of a published speech clears the same rights standard — the acquisition list is named in the Cited Photo Archive’s Listen frame (Booker T. Washington 1906, Marian Anderson 1939, Fannie Lou Hamer 1964, Barbara Jordan 1976, Shirley Chisholm 1970, each to enter only with its rights basis documented per item) — the audio is attached to that speech’s item on this page, with the recording’s own evidence line. No recording is published here on a guess.
Source: CultureTechLens