Martin Luther King Denied Rights Essay

Denied Rights

American civil liberties come straight from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These are very important because they are rights that are guaranteed to every citizen in the US, but sometimes, not all of them are granted to everyone. Civil Liberties are still to this day an issue in the US because of the lack of freedom of speech, racial equality, and women’s rights.

The story behind the image of Martin Luther King Jr. protesting US involvement in Vietnam shows denial of freedom of speech. In the picture, MLK is walking alongside Dr. Benjamin Spock and Father Frederick Reed in New York in 1967. There is also a child holding a poster that reads “Children are not born to burn”. King is using logos and pathos to protest because he doesn’t want to keep sending soldiers to their deaths. He also wrote many speeches explaining why it wasn’t a good idea. But once he publically stated his opinion using logos and pathos, people turned against him. According to his editor Carson, MLK “lost his biggest allies”, which was president Lyndon B. Johnson, in DC once he opposed the war. But through all this, King was able to impact the US when it came to racial segregation.

Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman?

shows how hard it was to be an African American woman in the 1800s. She thinks it’s unfair that white women are “helped in carriages” and “have the best place everywhere”(Truth 2). She uses pathos to explain that this is based on the biased opinion of white men. She is a woman but she is put down and forgotten about because of her skin color. The author later talks about people who say women don’t deserve as many rights because “Christ wasn’t a women” (4) but she argues and says “[your Christ came] from God and a woman!”(4) and that “[Men had] nothing to do with Him”(4). She now uses logos to give facts from the bible and demonstrate her point. Truth proves her listeners wrong when they try to deface African American

women.
Much like African Americans, women are denied many rights still today. Susan B. Anthony’s speech On Women’s Rights To Vote shows the struggle women face in America. She insists that “It was we, the people” instead of “we, the male citizens”(Anthony 3). Men are set above just because they control the government and are stronger. The “blessings of liberty are forever withheld”(4) from woman in America because of the “hateful oligarchy of sex”(5). She uses pathos to prove that the highness of men os unfair. Anthony even goes on to explain that she thinks the discrimination against women is as crazy and out of hand as the discrimination against African Americans. Still today, women receive unequal pay, so women not being equal to men is still a problem.
Civil Liberties are still an enormous problem in the US because of the denial of freedom of speech, racial equality, and women’s rights. In the creation of America, the people were given these rights so it is unfair and unjust that they are denied to some people.