As an activist for over sixty years in the long freedom movement, Kipp Dawson has given hundreds of speeches, invited talks, lectures, and panel presentations. She addressed over 70,000 people packed into Kezar Stadium in San Francisco during the Vietnam antiwar movement and shared the stage with Coretta Scott King, Janis Joplin, Judy Collins, and many other notable leaders. She gave talks all over the United States, often merging the call for racial justice, women’s rights, gay liberation, anti-imperialism, unionism, and education justice. Young people in Mexico City invited Dawson to speak before a large crowd in the lead up to the Mexican Student Movement. On a two week trip to the United Kingdom to support the British miners’ strike, she crisscrossed England and Wales making one and sometimes two speeches a day. She spoke more informally with groups of workers in Cuba, Australia, and El Salvador.

The five speeches presented here represent a range of issues and movements and span more than twenty years. In much of her work through the end of the 1980s, Dawson organized through the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Two of the speeches demonstrate how she helped to theorize a socialist gay liberation and articulated a Marxist-feminist perspective on the women’s movement. Dawson often typed drafts of her speeches on the back of out-of-date flyers for other movement events. The following documents include some of those flyers, as well as newspaper and data clippings that she used to prepare her speeches, additional photographs, and brief overviews to contextualize each speech in its moment in the movement. These speeches and many more are contained in the Kipp M. Dawson Papers at the University of Pittsburgh.