Delivers graduation address "A Plea for the Oppressed" at Oberlin College

On August 27, 1850, Lucy Stanton delivered a commencement address titled "A Plea for the Oppressed" as part of Oberlin College's graduation exercises. At the time, Stanton served as president of Oberlin's Ladies' Literary Society, a role that reflected both her academic standing and her leadership among her peers.

The address was a searing indictment of American slavery and racial prejudice, delivered in an era when Black women were rarely permitted to speak publicly at all, let alone at a formal academic commencement before a mixed audience of Black and white students, faculty, and townspeople. In her speech, Stanton called upon her listeners to recognize the humanity of enslaved people and to actively work toward abolition, drawing on both moral and religious arguments common to the abolitionist rhetoric of the period.

This address is historically significant not only for its content but for the platform it represented: Oberlin College was one of the very few institutions in the United States at the time that admitted Black students and women, and Stanton's speech stands as one of the earliest known public abolitionist addresses delivered by an African American woman at an American institution of higher learning.

The speech, later preserved and studied by historians, remains a document of early Black feminist and abolitionist thought, situating Stanton among the vanguard of Black women intellectuals of the pre-Civil War era, alongside figures like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Maria Stewart.