The checked list of civil rights speeches source check

A civil rights speeches source check starts with a sentence. It is attributed to a movement leader, dated to a year, and it appears on thousands of pages with the same wording. You want to use it. This page is the procedure for finding out whether you can, and what you actually have.

This page is written for this tradition specifically. Its sources differ from those for a national political speech. Often no official transcript exists. The speaker may have said a passage in a dozen towns. The circulated text may have been assembled decades later.

Nothing here invents a quotation or attaches a line to a name without a record. The method is about documents, and the checked list below names the records.

What to take away

Step one: strip the sentence down

Each can fail independently. Most source checks in this tradition find that the words are real, the speaker is right, and the occasion is wrong. The passage was given several times, and the famous date won.

Then note the exact wording you started with, including punctuation and any ellipsis. You will need it to date the phrasing later.

For Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," the four claims are that he spoke the words, at the Lincoln Memorial, on August 28, 1963, in the form you have. All four hold for the Washington address. The dream refrain itself had been used in Detroit on June 23, 1963.

Step two: find where your version came from

Take the page you found it on. Does it cite anything? If so, go there. Repeat.

You are following a chain of copies backwards. You are looking for the point at which someone stops citing another web page and cites a document.

Expect the chain to be short. Most pages carrying a quotation cite nothing. Search the exact wording with a date filter, oldest first. Find the earliest appearance of your phrasing you can.

That date is your first real finding. Compare it to the date of the occasion claimed. A gap of decades means your wording entered circulation through the commemorative layer, not through anyone who was in the room.

Trace "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." The earliest record that made it circulate is Fannie Lou Hamer's televised testimony on August 22, 1964, before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The phrase circulated from that broadcast.

Trace "The Ballot or the Bullet." The Cleveland recording is dated April 3, 1964, at Cory Methodist Church. Malcolm X gave a similar address in Detroit on April 12, 1964. Two occasions, two records, one title.

Step three: go to the holding institutions, and the checked list

Now leave the web and look for artifacts. In this tradition they are held in places a general search will not surface.

An archival finding aid is organized by the papers of a person or an organization rather than by event. That explains why searching for a speech by name so often returns nothing.

The checked list below gives six civil rights speeches. Each row names the earliest record reached, its layer, and what that record can establish.

The National Archives maintains a guide to its civil rights records that shows what the federal layer contains and how it is organized. Regional repositories rarely have anything so tidy; expect to write to an archivist.

Work upward through the table until you hit a document. Write down its identifier, where it is held, and what kind of thing it is.

For the checked list, the King and Lewis records sit in federal and university holdings. The Hamer papers sit in a state archive.

Step four: classify what you reached

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that determines what you are allowed to say.

Apply the classes to the checked list. The Hamer recording establishes what was audible on Aug. 22, 1964. It does not establish that she never said the phrase before. The Lewis draft establishes what was prepared, not what was delivered.

Step five: write the record

A source check that lives in your head is worthless to the next person. Keep a short note beside every line you consider using:

Number seven is "describe without quoting", not a defeat.

The speech analysis method gets almost everything from a recording without reprinting a word. A reader learns more from an accurate account of what a speaker did in a room than from a sentence that may belong to a different night.

For King's "I Have a Dream," item 5 is Detroit, June 23, 1963. For Hamer, item 4 is the televised recording against any printed transcript.

Where checks commonly fail

The general version of this discipline, for material with a proper official record, is described in the political speeches overview.

What differs here: much of the work happens in regional archives, and the honest result is often a description rather than a quotation. For reproduction questions once you have a source, public domain speeches covers status without assuming it.

The King refrain is the classic case of accepting the famous occasion as the first occasion.

Common questions

Which speeches are on the checked list?

The six in step three: Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Barbara Jordan. Each row names the earliest record reached.

How long does a proper check take?

If the trail ends at a web page, an hour. If it leads into a regional archive, weeks, because archivists answer letters in order. Budget for the second case before deciding the line is worth using.

What if the recording is held by the estate and I cannot hear it?

Then you have not reached it. Cite what you did reach, say that a recording is reported to exist and where, and do not quote from a text you could not compare against it.

Is a memorial edition ever a good enough source?

For a claim about what the edition prints, yes. For a claim about what was said in a room, no.