Week 4 Great speeches
Public Speaking

The context of this speech is extremely important for what took place on August 28th, 1963. It the height of a race war going on between blacks and whites in America this speech really hit home to a lot of people. It took place in Washington D.C., United States, approximately mid-day. The reason he must have chosen to speak in that location and time was because of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This was a huge demonstration to create support for the civil rights movement, as purposed by John F Kennedy. The audience he was speaking to were protesting for the civil rights movement that day in Washington. White and blacks joined together to listen to the speech that Dr. Martin Luther King was presenting. He had obviously done his homework. He originally was paying homage to Abraham Lincoln’s centennial of the emancipation proclamation. He had observed that even though 100 years later the black people were still not free. Forced to sit in designated areas and be a lower class of people during the time.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a very bright man, he had studied his audience and also the social heartache the Civil Rights Movement was putting the black people through. His background, growing up in Mississippi, had shown him there was a problem with the culture and misrepresentation with the black people of America. He had realized even being freed from slavery did not essentially make them free. He wanted equality for blacks, whites, Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and everyone in between. Previously he had given a speech about the American dream versus reality, all while using ideas from the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and the United States Constitution. While he had studied in all these in great detail, he had no idea how important his speech was going to be. The use of words and