Speech therapy.

• Author: Wicker, Tom

MOST ANTHOLOGIES ARE collections of the familiar. A splendid exception is Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches, edited by Josh Gottheimer. It includes not only selections from the inspiring but oft-told story of how American blacks emerged, first from slavery, then from sharecrop peonage, finally from the shadows of Jim Crow into full legal citizenship, but also readings from the women's, Hispanic American, Asian American, and gay rights movements.

A former speechwriter for President Clinton (who contributes a foreword) Gottheimer attributes the inspiration for his book to his White House days: "While rummaging through the bookshelves of the White House Library ... I could not find one book to put on my office shelf, no single volume containing the fiery rhetoric of DuBois, the drawling prose of Lyndon Johnson, or the measured verse of Berry Friedan. This collection was crafted to be a central source of civil rights speeches for writers, activists and students of history."

The anthology's title is taken from Robert Kennedy's notable speech to the National Union of South African Students in Cape Town on June 7,1966: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

In American movements for justice and equality, the ripples began early and never stopped coming; In 1789, three quarters of a century before Lincoln freed the slaves, an unnamed Negro, whose words are presented here, paraphrased Shakespeare to ask: "Has not a Negro eyes? Has not a Negro hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die?"

Ripples of Hope is more than a repository of texts. It allows readers to see how decades-and centuries-old themes still reverberate and echo today. In the first of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's many speeches, delivered at Seneca Falls, NY., in 1848, she declared the root principle that "woman herself must do this work ... Man cannot speak for her because he has been educated to believe that she differs from him so materially that he cannot judge of her thoughts, feelings, and opinions by his own." From the same rostrum 150 years later, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked Up the same idea...