If You Believe The Ed Force Rhetorical Analysis

Marcus Garvey preached to the American people about excepting Negroes into American society and equal rights for white and black men alike. He hated seeing people of his race experience discrimination due to the color of their skin. In an attempt to change the American perceptive he utilizes the rhetorical strategy of repetition as well as he asks questions them immediately answers them throughout his speeches to drive home his point.

Marcus Garvey utilized repetition throughout his speeches to put emphasis on the main idea that Negroes deserve the same respect as anyone else, but they need to work hard and show the nation what they have the capacity to do great things in order for any change to occur. In his speech “If You Believe the

Negro Has No Soul”, he uses anaphors to draw the reader to this ideal. He wants the Negroes in the nation to become one unified force, therefore, he proclaims, “We want to unite the Negro race in this country.

We want every negro to work for one common goal...We want the moral and financial support of every Negro to make this dream a possibility” (“Soul” 1). Not only does Garvey use inclusive pronouns to draw the listener into the speech but his uses repetition to grant the audience an opportunity to really understand what message he desires them to receive. By repeating the phrase “we want” he calls out to fellow negroes to unify with him as well as whites in order to proclaim that blacks have had enough of being the “inferior race” and they will join together and fight for their rights. The repetition of this phrase helps the listener understand that he honestly wants this to occur as well as it helps to leave a longer lasting impression in the reader’s mind. He utilizes repetition again in his speech “Shall the Negro Be Exterminated?” In this speech, he follows the same lines of using inclusive pronouns and repetition to place emphasis on the speeches main idea. He continues on the same lines as the previous speech and wants to create unity throughout the Negro race but in order for that to occur they must understand the

opposing sides leading him to proclaim, “we must, martyr-like, make up our minds and our hearts to pay the price of leadership. We must be sympathetic, we must be forgiving, we must” (“Exterminated” 2). Garvey wants the negro race to unify and fight for their rights as one force, but they can not accomplish this task if they ignore and shut out the people who have a lower intelligence or are naive to the situations occurring around them. In order to create any change, Garvey feels that the race as a whole needs accept all negroes no matter what they believe. He implements repetition into this speech to allow the listener to comprehend the importance of his message. By hearing the phrase multiple times the mind subconsciously starts believing that it as truth, and the listener realizes that “we must” be sympathetic in order to successfully accomplish this plan.
Throughout his speeches Marcus Garvey also implements the rhetorical strategy of asking a question then immediately answering it in order to make the listener's mind ponder on the situation for a moment before he explains the reason.

In his 1925 speech “True Solution to the Negro Problem”, Garvey continues to express his frustration with the fact that Negroes get treated like inferior citizens of the United States and that they deserve the same treatment as a white citizen. Throughout the United States at the time lynching Negroes developed into a painfully frequent occurrence. In the speech, he ponders on the fact of, “do [the American people] lynch Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, or Japanese?” (“Problem” 1). He asks this question so the listener has the opportunity to recall any incidents where they have heard of Americans lynching any of these races. He follow-ups that question by stating “No. And Why? Because these people are represented by great governments, mighty nations and empires, strongly organized” (“Problem 1). Garvey strongly believes that negroes in America would experience better treatment if they had a nation backing up their protection, but they do not, which leads him to his fight for unity. By asking the question, the listener realizes that not having a powerful nation backing up negroes leads them to stand apart from other races and has the opportunity to infer that this causes the lack of reform to stop this cruel treatment. This strategy occurs in

Garvey’s satire speech, “White Man’s Solution to the Negro Problem” as well. In this piece, he over dramatizes immigration within America to display the feelings that many Negroes obtained this era of American history. America expanded its arms to European immigrants but turned its back to the suffering negroes already living in the country. White immigrants come to America by the thousands every month and he questions in his speech, “why? The idea is to build up a vast white population in America, so as to make the white people independent of Negro labor; thereby depriving them of the means of livelihood, the wherewithal to buy bread, which means that in a short while they will die of starvation” (“Problem” 1). He questions the reason why whites flood into the country to spark curiosity and anger within the Negro population in hopes that people will join his fight for unity. Using a strategy of asking questions then answering then immediately allows the listener to ponder on their opinion on the situation before he presents his opinion which leads the listener to accept of their opinions.
Marcus Garvey fought for equality for negroes in hopes it would improve their lives in America. He wants to unify the negro race so that they can together fight against discrimination. In order to achieve this goal, he implements repetition so that the idea gets engraved into the listener's mind. He also implements the rhetorical strategy of question asking so that the listener ponders the question before he inserts his opinion.