Public Speaking: Mary Terrell Speech

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/dc2.htm

In this blog post I will blog about something that's going on in my public speaking class this week. Our assignment is to pick a famous public speaker that was on the list posted on Schoology and pick a speech also. Once we had picked the famous public speaker and one of their famous speeches we have to be able to memorize it by Thursday. I think that this will be a difficult assignment for me because I’m not that great with memory The speakers name that I chose is Mary Church Terrell. Her speech is about two pages long. The title of it is What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States. The author of this speech was an activist for civil rights. She was the first african american to earn a college degree, and she was the daughter of former slaves. Mary’s speech is about how people used to say that Washington D.C was a colored persons paradise. The speech that she wrote informs people that that is incorrect. She describes how she is treated and how other colored people are treated in Washington D.C. Mary also compares how white people are treated to the way colored people were treated. She tells about how white people were paid more when the colored people would be doing the same jobs as them but not get paid much at all. She also described how much more respect the white people had than all the colored people that lived there. In my opinion I think her speech is very good. She gets her point across in a great way, and really describes how she feels about the situation that was going on in the country in a polite way. Mary used nice words to really make the audience understand what she was trying to tell everyone.