The collection begins with Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America, followed by Jermain Wesley Loguen's I Am a Fugitive Slave, the famous Ain't I a Woman? speech by Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass's immortal What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July? Subsequent orators include John Sweat Rock, John M. Langston, James T. Rapier, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Francis J. Grimké, Marcus Garvey, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Martin Luther King, Jr., 's I Have a Dream speech appears here, along with Malcolm X's The Ballot or The Bullet, Shirley Chisholm's The Black Woman in Contemporary America, The Constitution: A Living Document by Thurgood Marshall, and Barack Obama's Knox College Commencement Address.