Vida Goldstein: 'The step I am taking is unique in the history of the world', campaign launch speech - 1903

14 October 1903, Liberty Hall, Portland, Victoria, Australia

This speech was sourced by podcast guest Professor Clare Wright for her book ‘You Daughters of Freedom’. It was originally reported verbatim in the Portland Gazette in the third person. Prof Wright changed it to first person to recreate the actual feel of the speech. It has also been abridged to be read at Sydney Writers Festival ‘Friends Romans Countrymen’ event in 2022. Audio used with permission.

Miss Goldstein, on rising, was met with loud applause.

The people of Portland all know why I have decided to open my campaign here, and I will only add that when that decision was announced the people of Melbourne wanted to know why I was going to Portland, and even where Portland was, and disappointment was felt that Melbourne had not been selected.

The step I am taking is unique in the history of the world, and may be called history- making in Australia. Portland is the place most connected with the early history of Australia, and the honour, I have decided, of the first address of a woman candidate for a seat in Parliament by the joint franchise should be given to Portland. (Applause.)

The idea of a woman candidate is so unusual in British Dominions that to some it seems a revolutionary step. There have been women in Parliament in Great Britain, but they are there by (hereditary) right and in the interests of their landed property and naturally are not parallel cases. They take their seats and consider such quite proper to represent their vested interests. We have got beyond that idea, and the right now is that of the franchise—the modern right now of every sane law-abiding citizen—the Government of the people by the people for the people, and which was secured in 1902, and which now is by man and woman for men and women.

So the old order passeth away and the old conditions for the Commonwealth of Australia changeth. The Australian nation has been the first to adopt that just democratic idea, without respect to property.

The Woman's Federal Political Association has requested me to be nominated for the Federal Election, and after consideration I have consented.

I will have all the hard work of holding meetings to organise my campaign, and naturally have to start out greatly handicapped to the men candidates. I hold a deep- rooted principal that woman should step out and assume her share of the responsibilities of the office … I know I must have those who believe in woman for home duties and such like against me, but I believe it is the duty of woman to take her share in the work to protect her interests, and that she should take the deepest interest in political matters.

Personally, I have no axe to grind, and if I desire a peaceful life I should remain out of politics. I believe, however, that woman should go in for some of these duties, not for self-interest or the amount of money hanging to it, as so many men do, but because it should be the duty of all to do the best they can for the State, one way or the other.

I am convinced I could do my share if elected to Parliament, (applause), and that expressions of opinion given on the floor of the House by woman will not be altogether valueless. (Applause.)

It used to be hard to get the ear of a member of Parliament if you were not a voter, but now we have one it is far different. There are many unjust laws on the Statute books … For instance the law of custodian in which the wife has no right to her children, and which the husband can will away, and the mother is absolutely without power to stop the taking away of her child. Do some of you now wonder we want a voice in the making of the laws? (Applause.)

If elected I do not intend to ally myself with anyone; I am going on my own. (Applause.)

I do not approve of party Government, as Government on strict party lines is Government by machinery. One objection is that it must be my party, right or wrong. Party organs, such as newspapers, are dangerous. The party arranges a platform and this is to be gone for blindly or as dictated to by the party organisations. (Applause.)

I favour the public democratic principle to think for one's self, and not to suffer the despotism of Russia.

Regarding the Fiscal Question, I must confess to be a protectionist—(applause)—although it would be more in my line to call myself a fiscal athiest. Women, children, duty, low wages, &c., are not ones which are troubled by the fiscal question. Over free trade and protection I do not get keenly excited—I let the men get excited instead.

I am in favor of White Australia, but against the deportation of the poor Kanakas, who have been brought to the State, and to deport them means in some cases death through intermarrying. They should not insist on the deportations. (Applause.) Having brought the Kanakas here our people should be prepared to bear the consequences, but no more should be allowed in. These people have been civilised, christianised, educated, and there is no reason to force them out. I am decidedly opposed to colored people coming in. Those who are going for a White Australia are going bald-headed for it. (Laughter.)

I am rather wobbly on Assisted Immigration, as I have seen a good deal of this since going to America, where I have seen 1oo,ooo dumped down in New York to swell the labor market and give cheap labor. (Applause.)

Arbitration and Conciliation have my support, as I believe it would stem endless trouble and loss, and do away with the bitterness and distress of lock-outs and strikes.

The establishing of a Federal Capital and building of a Transcontinental railway I am not in favor of, chiefly on account of the wild expense likely to be involved. (Applause.)

It is so seldom that I have such an opportunity to address a meeting like this that I can not resist the temptation to speak to the women and impress upon you the necessity of using your power to secure your rights!

W.E.B. Du Bois: 'We must not falter, we may not shrink!' Niagara Movement speech - 1905

February 1905, Buffalo, New York, USA

The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year’s hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread turn toward the nation and again ask in the name of ten million the privilege of a hearing. In the past year the work of the Negro hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man’s ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation’s capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies.

Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the Slave–a by-word and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishment. Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow-citizens born and bred on its soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness the new American creed says: Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice.

In detail our demands are clear and unequivocal. First, we would vote; with the right to vote goes everything: Freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise, and let no man listen to those who deny this.

We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever.

Second. We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease. Separation in railway and street cars, based simply on race and color, is un-American, un-democratic, and silly. We protest against all such discrimination.

Third. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk, and be with them that wish to be with us. No man has a right to choose another man’s friends, and to attempt to do so is an impudent interference with the most fundamental human privilege.

Fourth. We want the laws enforced against rich as well as poor; against Capitalist as well as Laborer; against white as well as black. We are not more lawless than the white race, we are more often arrested, convicted, and mobbed. We want justice even for criminals and outlaws. We want the Constitution of the country enforced. We want Congress to take charge of Congressional elections. We want the Fourteenth amendment carried out to the letter and every State disfranchised in Congress which attempts to disfranchise its rightful voters. We want the Fifteenth amendment enforced and No State allowed to base its franchise simply on color.

The failure of the Republican Party in Congress at the session just closed to redeem its pledge of 1904 with reference to suffrage conditions at the South seems a plain, deliberate, and premeditated breach of promise, and stamps that party as guilty of obtaining votes under false pretense.

Fifth, We want our children educated. The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace and in few towns and cities are Negro schools what they ought to be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.

These are some of the chief things which we want. How shall we get them? By voting where we may vote, by persistent, unceasing agitation; by hammering at the truth, by sacrifice and work.

We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of the raid nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous violence of the mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right. And here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free.

Our enemies, triumphant for the present, are fighting the stars in their courses. Justice and humanity must prevail. We live to tell these dark brothers of ours–scattered in counsel, wavering and weak–that no bribe of money or notoriety, no promise of wealth or fame, is worth the surrender of a people’s manhood or the loss of a man’s self-respect. We refuse to surrender the leadership of this race to cowards and trucklers. We are men; we will be treated as men. On this rock we have planted our banners. We will never give up, though the trump of doom finds us still fighting.

And we shall win. The past promised it, the present foretells it. Thank God for John Brown! Thank God for Garrison and Douglass! Sumner and Phillips, Nat Turner and Robert Gould Shaw, and all the hallowed dead who died for freedom! Thank God for all those to-day, few though their voices be, who have not forgotten the divine brotherhood of all men white and black, rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate.

We appeal to the young men and women of this nation, to those whose nostrils are not yet befouled by greed and snobbery and racial narrowness: Stand up for the right, prove yourselves worthy of your heritage and whether born north or south dare to treat men as men. Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?

Courage brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. All across the skies sit signs of promise. The Slav is raising in his might, the yellow millions are tasting liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and everywhere the laborer, with ballot in his hand, is voting open the gates of Opportunity and Peace. The morning breaks over blood-stained hills. We must not falter, we may not shrink. Above are the everlasting stars.