Brings together, for the first time, eighty trailblazing speeches by forty-two African American freedom-fighters who made a revolutionary impact on UK and Irish nineteenth-century transatlantic literary cultures and political histories.

Reproduces speeches that have not previously been transcribed or published in a contemporary scholarly edition.

Includes an in-depth introductory essay, author biographies, annotations, and detailed bibliographies to provide specialist and general audiences with the literary, political, historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts that were fundamental to nineteenth century Black transatlantic literary production.

These 80 speeches constitute radical declarations of Black artistic and political independence by bearing witness to each orator’s determination to resist white racist attempts to script, edit, and censor Black acts and arts of imaginative cultural production.

This is the first anthology of eighty speeches by forty-two world famous and under-researched African American freedom fighters, liberators and human rights campaigners living and working in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England in the nineteenth century. Their pioneering and revolutionary works are supported by an in-depth introductory essay, author biographies, scholarly annotations and detailed bibliographies.