The Speakers Corner

The Lady with the Lamp, the Statue of Liberty, stands in New York Harbour. Her back is squarely turned on the USA. It’s no wonder, considering what she would have to look upon. She would weep, if she had to face this way.

—Claudia Jones

The Speakers’ Corner at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, diagonally across the intersection from where you are standing, was well known in the early 1910s, elevating political orators in all senses. Speakers, often standing on wooden soapboxes, attracted crowds passing through the bustling intersection central to transportation and social life in Harlem, down the street from the famed YMCA and across from Harlem Hospital. By the 1930s, orators were gathering on several Harlem street corners finding sanctuary for political thought that espoused cultural pride, radical change, and economic self-sufficiency. 

Marcus Garvey gave his first speech from the Speakers’ Corner in 1916, commemorated by the plaque that sat on the outside of the Schomburg Center until its 2016 renovation. (The plaque, on display in the exhibition nearby, is shown in its current state before conservation.) Jamaica-born Garvey also had much in common with outspoken, active socialist Claudia Jones: born in the Caribbean, living in Harlem, both eventually became publishers and were deported from the United States for their political beliefs. Garvey influenced a young Malcolm X in the power of oration and reaching everyday people; Malcolm X would go on to be the most famed and influential of these streetcorner prophets. His legacy lives on—in the Schomburg Center, which stewards his archive, including the recently added typescripts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as well on the street that now bears his name.