The bounty that expansion of opportunity has produced

for all Americans showed itself at the highest level of our
civic life in  with the emergence of a black man and a
white woman as the leading candidates for the presidential
nomination of the Democratic Party. For me, celebrating
within one year those two historic events of the past while
contemplating the striking political possibilities of our pres-
ent underscored something common to both: the critical
power of words, often words delivered as speeches and in
public advocacy, to move individuals and the nation. During
the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, black
Americans not only depended on the power of the word as a
source of comfort and inspiration. They also effectively used
it to compel white America to come to its moral senses and
live up to Lincoln’s great rhetorical description of the nation
in the Gettysburg Address: “conceived in liberty and dedi-
cated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The speeches in this book, which begin with my becoming

head of the National Urban League in  and continue to
the spring of , were driven, above all, by my concern with
black Americans’ fundamental pursuit of the post–s era:
to fuse the promise of the civil rights movement’s legal and
legislative victories with the actual lived experience of black
Americans. They were meant to address the facts and circum-
stances of urgent issues roiling American society, supporting
or rebutting the arguments of a particular moment. But, con-
sidering them both singly and in their totality now, they also

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INTRODUCTION

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