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The article discusses the 1881 address of reformer Frederick Douglass that paid tribute to abolitionist John Brown and the theory on John Brown problem. Topics mentioned include the problem of his oration with meanings for contemporary social justice work, the legacy of John Brown that navigated between resignation and hagiography, and the delivery of the address at Storer College in West Virginia.

This article argues that Barack Obama's rhetorical example—captured in 4 addresses in response to acts of violence—suggests habits of mind to help us begin to navigate perhaps the most vexing democratic conundrum of our age: Can we find words to realize reconciliation and trust across lines of racial difference, given the violence that infects our efforts to talk to each other? The tensions occasioned by the intersection of race and violence comprised the defining conditions of Obama's presidency. The underpinnings of those conditions and the ways Obama rhetorically worked within them invite us to profoundly rethink how we might articulate a nuanced civic honesty, an honesty inflected by the rhetorical-politics of Black anger modeled by James Baldwin. Together, this honesty, that anger, illuminate understandings of the ways Obama marshaled rhetorical resources to combat the political lynchings ravaging our contemporary civic polity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines Edwin Black's seminal essay `The Second Persona' which provides the orientation that guides efforts to locate the audience in Ralph Waldo Emerson's `Fugitive Slave Law' oration. Effect of Daniel Webster on Emerson's speech; Distinct mode of rhetorical judgment; Assumptions of Black's essay.