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After graduating from Atlanta University, Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933) began a lifelong career as an educator and the founder of numerous institutions for the upliftment of freedmen and their children. In 1883 she founded the first school for black children in Augusta, Georgia. She was principal of the Haines Institute for Industrial and Normal Education for 50 years.

In February 1833, the African American orator and abolitionist Maria W. Stewart gave a controversial speech at Boston’s African Masonic Lodge which drew a hostile response from the audience, as she criticized her own people for not standing up for themselves. She accused black men of being indifferent to African rights and liberty, claiming that they “lacked ambition and courage”. The audience’s negative reaction to her inflammatory rhetoric led to Maria’s formal retirement from public speaking at a farewell adddress in September of that year.

The abolitionist, essayist, teacher, and women’s rights activist Maria W. Stewart is thought to have been the first African American woman to raise matters of equality and justice in a US public forum, the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston. In her 1832 lecture, Why Sit Ye Here and Die?, she demanded equal rights for African American women while criticizing both the slavery of the South and the lack of opportunity and equality in the North. Her biblical style of oratory and fierce opposition to injustice still inspire today.

Ms. Truth opens this speech by saying that black men and women gathering together should strike fear into the general population's hearts - and right she is. She dismisses the idea that women can't get things done and claims that women can change anything if they put their mind to it.