Picture Martin Luther King Jr. standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech to over 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington. Could he have known, in that moment, that his words would terrify some, inspire many more, and echo across decades of social movements?
King and the other historical Black leaders in this article didn’t begin their work aiming to reinvent communication. They set out to describe what they saw, heard, and endured in America as honestly as they could. Yet through speeches, stories, and inventions, they permanently changed how ideas travel and how voices are heard.
Born into slavery in New York as Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth’s path to freedom included the heartbreak of leaving some of her children behind when she escaped with her infant daughter. After “walking” away from bondage and securing her freedom, she chose the name Sojourner Truth, convinced it was her religious duty to travel and speak truth wherever she went.
Truth’s 1851 speech at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, was later popularized under the title “Ain’t I a Woman?” It drew on her lived experience to confront both racism and sexism. Blending storytelling and moral conviction, Truth used public speech to expose the hypocrisy of laws and customs that claimed to protect women while excluding Black women.
Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in Maryland as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He was sent to live with a Baltimore ship carpenter, an experience he later described as having “laid the foundation” for his future, as it allowed him to learn to read and observe urban life.
He escaped slavery on September 3, 1838, traveling from Baltimore to New York before settling in Massachusetts and taking the name Frederick Douglass. He threw himself into study and abolitionist organizing, becoming one of the 19th century’s most influential speakers and newspaper editors. Douglass used vivid, audience‑centered rhetoric—powerful enough to pierce “flinty hearts”—to change how Americans talked about slavery and show others how to persuade an audience.
Civil rights leader and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. was a master of rhetorical strategies like repetition, metaphor, and biblical allusion. Through his carefully crafted words, he reached audiences across racial and regional lines.
King blended training in theology and philosophy with a deep familiarity with the Black church preaching tradition. This combination allowed him to weave moral argument and emotional appeal into a single, soaring voice.
His “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the March on Washington in 1963, is often cited as a masterclass in speechwriting and delivery. After straying from his prepared text and moving into the improvised “I have a dream” refrain, King used repetition to build momentum, clarify his vision, and leave a rhetorical legacy that still guides speechwriters today.
Ida B. Wells‑Barnett’s journalism took a decisive turn after the lynching of her friend and business partner, Thomas Moss. The lynching happened in Memphis, where she co‑owned and edited the newspaper Free Speech.
Outraged by the killings and the false stories that followed, she launched a meticulous investigation into lynching across the United States. During her travels, she risked her own safety as she interviewed witnesses and combed public records.
In pamphlets such as “Southern Horrors” and the 1895 publication “A Red Record,” Wells‑Barnett combined statistics, eyewitness testimony, and forceful editorials to expose lynching as a tool of racial terror. Well before modern investigative and data journalism, she showed how oppressed communities could build their own media channels when mainstream outlets failed them.
James Arthur Baldwin grew up in Harlem in a strict religious household. His early experiences as a Black, openly gay writer shaped both the content and urgency of his work. Facing racism, homophobia, and poverty, he drew on these pressures in his writing to examine American myths about innocence, progress, and belonging.
His novels, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” explore race, sexuality, and faith. Essay collections like “The Fire Next Time” also helped establish him as a major voice of the civil rights era. Through lectures, debates, and television appearances, Baldwin modeled a style of public speaking that refused to soften hard truths but showed the full humanity of both allies and opponents.
Readers who encounter Toni Morrison’s fiction often describe her presence on the page as a force of nature. A novelist, editor, and essayist, she explored Black life in America through richly layered narratives that refused to translate or apologize for the Black experience.
Her acclaimed novel “Beloved” uses shifting points of view and stream of consciousness to express the psychological devastation of slavery and its aftermath. Through her work, Morrison normalized writing for Black readers and changed how authors, critics, and publishers think about race, language, and literary authority.
Unlike the writers and speakers on this list, Marian Croak changed communication through technology.
A pioneering engineer who spent many years at Bell Labs and AT&T, Croak played a key role in developing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which allows voice and video to travel efficiently over data networks.
Thanks to her work, everyday tools such as internet phone calls, video conferencing platforms, and text‑to‑donate campaigns are now taken for granted. Now vice president of AI and human-centered technology at Google, Croak has more than 200 patents to her name. She also works on racial justice initiatives and mentors women and underrepresented groups in engineering.
Your last phone call probably relied on James West’s work. A physicist and acoustician, West co‑invented the electret microphone with Gerhard Sessler in the early 1960s while working at Bell Labs.
Electret microphones are small, reliable, and inexpensive, which made them ideal for mass‑produced devices. Today, versions of this technology appear in most telephones, laptops, hearing aids, and headsets, enabling clear, affordable voice transmission. West, like Marian Croak, also holds more than 200 patents.
It’s hard to capture the full scope of what these innovators accomplished. Each one led a life full of achievements, and the eight names here are just a small fraction of the Black thinkers, artists, and inventors who changed how we speak, listen, and connect.
Their work offers an invitation: Keep exploring. As you read their writings, listen to their speeches, and learn about their inventions, you won’t just discover how they changed communication. You’ll also reveal how they changed expectations of whose stories deserve to be told.
You don’t need to lead a march, publish a novel, or patent a new technology to grow as a communicator. Learning to express ideas clearly, listen carefully, and think critically already makes you a more capable colleague and community member.
If you’re interested in developing those skills, The University of Texas Permian Basin’s online Bachelor of Arts in Communication offers coursework in areas like public speaking, media studies, interpersonal communication, and strategic messaging. Four specialized track options mean you can tailor your studies to your interests and goals.
If you want to be heard, it may take more than raising your voice. Honing your communication skills can help you reach the audiences that matter most, and UTPB’s online BA in communication is one place to start when you are ready to apply.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/articles/martin-luther-king-jr
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/toni-morrison
https://www.invent.org/inductees/marian-croak
https://www.invent.org/inductees/james-e-west
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