Throughout February, in honor of Black History Month, we’ve revisited speeches given by prominent African-Americans in the last 100 years.

But then we thought: With the election of President Barack Obama, was there anything he’s said on the campaign trail or as an acceptance speech that might equally stand the test of time?

Many might immediately turn to Obama’s inauguration address, but James Daley, editor of “Great Speeches by African-Americans: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and Others,” said he has a different speech in mind.

He points to the televised address Obama made on the campaign trail concerning race.

“To me, that is not only his greatest speech from a purely rhetorical standpoint, but from a historic standpoint in that he really defined an issue in the way that was just so much more honest than anybody ever did,” Daley said of the speech, which was delivered on March 18, 2008. “It wasn’t playing the victim, it wasn’t trying to be lofty, it was really saying, ‘This is how I feel, this is what I’ve been up against.

“I would place that as his best achievement as a speech and one of the greatest speeches in general.”

Even after the Civil Rights movement, Daley said, there continues to be a discourse of not only how far blacks have come, but how much further our nation needs to go to achieve equality. In William Pickens’ 1919 speech, printed earlier this month in The Times, he said “Everybody says ‘democracy,’ but everybody has his own definition.’”

And that struggle continues today, which is why Daley pointed to Obama’s speech on race.

“Ever since the civil rights movement, there has been this sense that we’ve made this progress but there’s still progress to be made,” Daley said.

“That’s the kind of place (Obama is) taking it now. It’s not enough that we have this equality in the workplace, we need to have more social unity. We need to start hanging out together and going to church together.”

Daley said when he put the book together in 2006, he included Obama because he thought the politician would be a prominent senator. “I put him in because I thought he would be big. I didn’t know he’d be this big,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Rhode Island, where he also teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island.

And while the original thought was to include Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National convention, Daley said the speech read too much like a stump speech for John Kerry, in hindsight.

And that’s the key to a speech that stands the test of time, he said. Historic speeches deal with larger issues or a greater message, not partisan politics.

The 2004 convention speech was “certainly his most historic speech in that it launched him on the national scene,” Daley said. “But that speech, upon looking back on it, it’s also very partisan, and I didn’t think a speech about John Kerry belonged in a book like this.”

So Daley chose the 2005 commencement address Obama gave at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Admittedly, he said, not a very well-known speech.

“It’s probably only reprinted here and on the college Web site,” Daley said. “But it does place Obama and his message in history, in terms of where we are or where we were when I put together this book.”