...Rhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail The nonviolent approach remains supreme as a way to achieve a peaceful resolution to conflict arising as a result of social, economical and political change in a contemporary society that has faced many of those challenges as a result of the fight for equality and social vices. This is because non-violent actions tend to create an atmosphere for peaceful negotiations and dialogue. In the case of Martin Luther King Jr in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, his idea was to create an atmosphere to frame the minds of his readers and clergymen of the situation in Birmingham caused by injustice and inequality. Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from Birmingham Jail was an icebreaker. The Letter intended to break the chains of segregation and injustice. The letter was written in the 1960s when African Americans were facing a series of injustices in the South as a result of racial segregation. This social injustice was seen in his letter when he used words such as “Negros,” to support his point. He said “ Negros have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the court. They have been more bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negations.”(Lee 215) These citations reiterate...
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...Renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner and celebrated orator, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in his zealous speech, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", illustrates and pleads for the growing need of active participation across a social revolution in America. Dr. King's purpose is to empower young African American college graduates and inspire positive involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the promotion of non-violent means. He adopts an authoritative tone in order to persuade his prospective audience into taking action and elevating the rights of African Americans across the nation. Dr. King begins his speech to the college graduates by acknowledging the great challenge to remain awake through the social revolution and transformation from the "old order of slavery" to the "idea of freedom and human dignity". He appeals to their consciences by stating the obstacles faced by the graduates were to unify the races and dissolve racial barriers "in terms of a brotherhood". He calls for "moral and ethical commitments" in order to create "a brotherhood" because he aims to inspire educated African Americans into catapulting themselves from the bottom of the social ladder to racial equality...
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...Martin Luther King Jr. uses specific rhetorical devices to tap into the emotions of a diverse audience. Throughout his letter MLK uses several rhetorical devices to stress important points and to allow the readers empathize and understand with black people in America who were lacking the civil rights they deserved. MLK uses devices such as metaphor and symbolism to make the audience sympathize with colored people, specifically the colored people in Birmingham. This helps the reader to understand the consequences that these people forced to deal with due to the extreme racism in the South. King utilizes diction to make his metaphor more powerful, “your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty… (P.264)”. His word...
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...regardless of their race or color. Even with this 15th amendment, the whites in the South had their own methods to keep African Americans from voting. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, was one of the many civil rights activists, whose idea was to get racial equality by grabbing the public's attention of racism, joined in the fight for civil right movement for black Americans. Dr. King led peaceful protests and boycotts without violence to get the right to vote for all kind. There were many strategies to...
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...is won, but the community battle goes on.”(Dorothy Day) “I have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr. is the most compelling speech. He used figurative language to help support his dream that all men will be able to be given the same treatment. Blacks won’t be satisfied until they are free. Martin Luther King Jr. uses imagery and diction to get to this point. This speech impacts all of American’s lives”...unspeakable horrors of police brutality…” (King, p2). This is diction because he uses words like unspeakable to explain that no one has any words to say about what the whites are doing and why they are doing it. “Negro in Mississippi cannot vote…”(King, p2). This is an example of imagery because it gives an example of where(Mississippi) and what(Blacks...
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...Doctor Martin Luther King Junior captured the entire crowd's attention with his strong and influential message. All of the crowd was cheering during the whole speech. The crowd got even louder when he quoted the message he was putting out there. Having an excellent message for what is being said is always a wonderful way to catch consideration. The audience will not dismiss a speech with an important message. The crowd stayed the entire speech. They reacted to everything Dr. King said. If the audience does decide to stay that means it has a good meaning. It also means it has a meaningful and important message. The crowd joined him to deliver the same message as him and they decided on him to speak for them. They chose him because...
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...Martin Luther King Jr. brilliantly crafts his letter to the clergymen with an appealing use of tropes and biblical references. His language and tone compels all audiences to think about their values and stand up for them. In his letter, Martin Luther King Jr. bombards us with an abundance of biblical references that would stick to the clergymen. Martin Luther King Jr. is appealing to his audience and their beliefs. He compares his actions to that of the Apostle Paul who, “left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ… so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home.” This shows his knowledge of the Bible and Christianity making him a more esteemed figure to the clergymen. His tropes elevate the letter...
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...Speech Opinions Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech is an important guideline and goal of equality for the world to follow. Even if the performance, and the marching was staged as Malcolm X stated, the morals of the speech are still valuable and relevant in today’s society. However I agree with Malcolm’s dissatisfaction with the people watching the speech and some participating in the march. To throw away personal opinions and pretend to support a cause to seem “chic”, as Malcolm wrote, is disrespectful to the cause. It is also disappointing that money and publicity bring more people together than serious issues that need to be resolved. Even in the present time most people don’t care about other people’s suffering unless it affects them directly. Throughout history it is clearly shown that affecting a nation's money is a sure way to get some sort of change. For example, the United States would have had no interest in being involved with the Middle East if they didn’t have a rich oil supply. Because oil is a profitable and limited product, the United States ensures that the Middle Eastern countries’ affairs don’t affect oil fields. The only thing that matters is profitable oil, not human lives....
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...After reading Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter From Birmingham Jail we can agree that it’s a great example of the variety of rhetorical devices that he uses that makes his latter so amazing, breathtaking and powerful. The audience for the letter was mainly for the White Birmingham Clergymen, the letter as a response to the claims they had made, and was also targeted towards others who were part of the racial segregation campaign and for those supporting King and other racial civil rights activists. So the letter was made for everyone, which is a pretty big audience, King just wanted people know what he was truly feeling during his time in his jail cell. The King's only purpose in writing the Letter From Birmingham Jail was to explain the terrible...
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...RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 1 Rhetorical Analysis of “I Have Dream” Speech Alfonso Gonzalez Itt Technical Institute Instructor Deana Schoneberg EN 1320 RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 2 The main point of Dr. Kings speech was that an injustice had been done to the black people. They were promised freedom from the emancipation proclamation and up to that point they still were not free. They were segregated and treated like second class citizens. Were they suppose to sit down and let white men at that time humiliate them, beat them, bomb their houses, and strip them of human dignity? No! Dr. King was preaching to all who listened, that now was the time to metaphorically cash this check, a check that will give them upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. But to do this, not with violence or retaliation, “we must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” (Carson, 1998, p225) This would be the way Dr. King would want to see his dream played out, with non -violence. Were all his efforts done in vain? On August 28, 1963, The March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin and led by union leader A. Philip Randolph. The backdrop ironically took place on the steps...
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...A Rhetorical Analysis of MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” Speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which outstandingly furthered the civil rights movement. At that time, racial segregation, police brutality, and other forms of racial inequality were terribly prominent in America. The speech successfully focused the country’s attention at the need for racial equality “Now” (King, I Have a Dream). King gave the speech in order to motivate his followers to peacefully continue to demonstrate, protest, and boycott until they were fully granted the equality and privileges that any other citizen was allowed to have. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech is his most notable, and one of the most influential of Twentieth-Century-America because of his excellent rhetorical use of repetition and anaphora, contrasting metaphors, and appropriate quotations and allusions throughout the speech. Martin Luther King Jr. used a profuse amount of repetition and anaphora throughout his speech. A subtle form of repetition, the repetition of singular words, was mainly used to emphasize key themes in the speech and keep them in the minds of the audience. Such repeated key themes were “freedom”, “justice” and “injustice”, “America” and “American”, and plural nouns such as “we” and “our”. Since the preceding words were repeated so frequently...
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...Rhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther King’s Speech “I Have a Dream” Likita M. Taylor ITT-Tech English 1320: Composition I November 12 2012 Rhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther King’s Speech “I Have a Dream” “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” These are the opening words of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”, which he predicted will be the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement and the turning point in finally ending segregation. Time and time again, his speech is credited as being “one of the most successful and most legendary speeches in United States history.”(Martin, 2010, 10 par 1). He was an astonishing, intelligent speaker who often relied on using strong rhetoric devices to get his message across. Through his articulate use of logos, pathos, and ethos, King was able to persuade his generation that "the Negro is not free.” (Martin 2001 par3). His speech became the rallying cry for civil rights and lives on to this day as a perpetual masterpiece. Before one can really understand the analysis of his speech, it is important to understand King’s arguments. His main point is that blacks are not free or equal according to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. He argues that African-Americans must claim their full rights and demand liberation from inequality and suppression. King's audience is not only Black Americans, but his message...
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...Written Assignment 4: Essay on Barack Obama’s speech at the Groundbreaking Ceremony of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial (2006) Even when a life ends, a soul can manage to live on with the people who it has left behind. This can appear through memorable deeds that a life can have managed to make before it passes. The above is what Barack Obama’s speech at the Groundbreaking Ceremony of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial from 2006 is about. Through the use of many of the same rhetorical instruments that Martin Luther King used before him, Obama establishes not only what Martin Luther King meant to America but also what he means to Obama on a personal level. In the following, I will make a rhetorical analysis and interpretation of the speech. The speech can be described as being an occasion speech which means that Obama’s aim is for him to entertain his audience at the memorial, by interpreting his vision of Martin Luther King Jr. The speaker is Barack Obama who is an African-American senator and soon-to-be presidential candidate in the United States. The audience for his speech is the participating to the national memorial, but primarily the speech is meant for the African-American inhabitants. He entertains his audience by reminding them of the great things that King has accomplished for the African-Americans in the United States of America: “I will tell them that because he did these things, they live today with the freedom God intended...
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...Martin Luther King Jr. speaks from the Birmingham Jail to the “new administration” about his nonviolent protests as a result of the violence towards blacks and to secure civil rights. King used the rhetorical devices ethos, logos and allusion to reach the clergymen. Martin Luther King Jr. uses ethos to influence his audience to trust him and believe that he knows what he’s talking about. King states “I am in Birmingham because there is injustice here ”pg.1 paragraph 3. In this quote King is telling the audience that he is in Birmingham for them, so he can stop the injustice. If he is there to stop injustice, then he is there for the people and their safety. That is how he uses ethos in this quote, it makes the people believe he...
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... Rhetoric strategy in Artistic Writing Pathos, logos, and ethos is clearly a tool and an instrument of writing that appeal to the seat of emotion, reason and ethnic. The strategy pays dividends to the extent that it calls to these three aspects of life to address issues. Scholars and majority writers in their scholarly and oratorical works have relied so much on the use of the rhetorical style of writing to construct pathos logos and ethos. “Letter from Birmingham Jail," by Martin Luther King Jr (Francisco, 23) is a profound example of this style at play. The three ideologies independently can survive any intellectual argument; they don’t have to work in tandem. This paper seeks to decipher the effect of using the rhetorical strategy to address racial injustice, and diverse religious ideology. Martin Luther employs the use of pathos and logos to create such a strong emotional appeal. To some extent, all human beings are caught in the inescapable network of mutuality. Martin Luther contends that whatever affects one person directly affect another indirectly. Martin Luther King Jr. in a sense achieves a deep sense of pathos by appealing to the logos. The emotional stylistic appeals clearly put the issues on steroids by drawing from particular aspects that cut across geographical location. The racial injustice is a threat to justice everywhere, including and not limited to Asia and Africa. Historically the world was on the verge of intellectual, emotional and radical...
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