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A Review of “Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches”

A perusal of the 22 speeches anthologized in Will of a People might provoke scholars of rhetoric, public address, and African American oratory to dismiss it as another volume of well-worn and oft-studied speeches by Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells Barnett, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Barbara Jordan, and Jesse Jackson, among others. However, despite its predictable content, the book warrants a closer look from anyone interested in ascertaining the power of eloquent oratory in sociopolitical struggle in general and its role in African Americans’ fight for human dignity and civil rights in particular. Moreover, the book’s chronological arrangement highlights the trajectory of the changing exigencies to which African American orators were responding and the diversity of those responses in the 19th and 20th centuries. Apropos of the volume’s title, the tenacious will of Black orators who shamed and challenged the nation to live up to its ideals is a theme in the story of American progress implicit in the orations collectively. In their eloquence and power the speeches articulate and forge a more inclusive vision of America that ultimately won out in the struggle over the meaning of American citizenship. Barack Obama’s presidency is emblematic of that victory. Fittingly, Obama’s first “Inaugural Address” (2009) is the last speech in the book, and Maria Miller Stewart’s “Why Ye Sit and Die” (1832) is the first. Juxtaposed, they evidence the monumental strides in racial progress made in the United States since the early part of the 19th century. Will of a People finds its most value as a tool for teaching undergraduates in rhetoric, public address, and rhetorical criticism courses. Strikingly, at the book’s outset, Leeman and Duffy urge the reader to use a simple but often overlooked strategy for teaching the rhetoric of oratory: Read the speeches out loud. Their “richness, eloquence, and power” (p. 1) are undeniable; therefore, “nothing substitutes for reading the speeches themselves”