Entry · catalog no. 1267
Easter speech
/ /ˈiːstər spiːtʃ/ /EE-stur SPEECH
n. · the South; national · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A memorized recitation delivered by a child before the congregation on Easter Sunday — two lines for the smallest, lengthening year by year into full poems and eventually original compositions. Handed out by the Sunday school teacher on a slip of paper, drilled at home for weeks, delivered in new clothes and new shoes. A child's first public speech, and the first rung of Black oratorical training.
“She had twenty-two lines that year and not one of them left her.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American congregations — Baptist, AME and Church of God in Christ — strongest in smaller, rural and Southern churches, and generations deep. E. Lynn Harris opens his memoir on Easter 1964 at Metropolitan Baptist in Little Rock, eight years old and handed the year's longest piece at twenty-two lines. Alice Walker wrote her six-year-old self delivering one in a green dress and biscuit-polished patent leather shoes. Oprah Winfrey gave her first at three and a half in a Kosciusko, Mississippi Baptist church and has credited it with starting her career. Earl H. Brooks of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County places the practice inside the larger tradition of African American rhetoric, alongside the work of Henry Louis Gates and Geneva Smitherman. The tradition is certainly older than the mid-century accounts that document it; those are simply the earliest dated ones the archive can point to.
1964
E. Lynn Harris recites twenty-two lines in Little Rock
2004
A young man's speech photographed for the Smithsonian's NMAAHC collection
2022
Documented at length in Duke Divinity's Faith & Leadership
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
the South; national · 1960s
Spoken by
Black congregations, especially rural and Southern
$EASTERThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Declining62 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1964
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Cynthia R. Greenlee, "Pride and pressure: The Easter speech," Faith & Leadership (Duke Divinity School), April 5, 2022
2022
■
E. Lynn Harris, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted
2003
■
+ Cite a sourceAlice Walker, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self," In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
1983
See also