Rhetorical Analysis Of Martin Luther King's Speech

On August 28, 1963, the legendary Martin Luther King Jr. gave his empowering speech, demanding equality among the African American and white race, and the injustices that have proved the conditions unequal between the two races. In his speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. uses many rhetorical devices to convey the idea that whites have brutally mistreated blacks for hundreds of years, even though, as a group, they have paved the nation, laying the foreground of the United States. Throughout his speech, King utilizes language to target whites for their sadistic behavior toward the blacks, when they were at the forefront of the country, even in its infant stages. The innocent, young Negro boy and girl know what African Americans did for the United

In his speech, King questions why misery would “constantly haunt the negro? In some distant past, had the forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and was the curse of punishment upon the black race?” (Paragraph 4). By the use of rhetorical questioning, King creates a vulnerable image for the blacks, because they were innocent victims of wrongdoing. They had done no harm to the whites, so why were they being so abused by them? When King questions and targets the whites, he is also using ethos to appeal to sympathy of the black race. African Americans were like a child being punished by their “parents,” the whites, for committing no misdemeanor. The first American to “shed blood in the revolution which freed his country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks,” yet blacks were still being penalized (Paragraph 5). King looks for sympathy in his audience to comply with the African American race, and to persuade them to believe in his point that blacks were being punished for no reason, only doing what the whites failed to do. Maybe that was why they were being punished— because blacks proved to be able to do what the whites could not. King creates this tone throughout the use of irony, and soft threats. Were the whites intimidated by African Americans, punishing blacks only

is able to efficaciously illustrate the awareness that whites have oppressed blacks for years, and had continued to do so, long after the Emancipation Proclamation, at times for reasons seemingly unknown to blacks. In fact, it has left a lasting impact on the present United States, as de-facto segregation continues to take place in more rural areas. However, it is important that this situation is altered because if not, what significance would the phrase “all men are created equal”