Rhetorical Analysis Of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A Dream Speech

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Arguably one of the greatest speakers of all time, Martin Luther King Jr. was indispensable to the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. While he has a multitude of celebrated speeches, “I Have a Dream” is considered the most prominent. In this speech, King calls for an end to racism in the country and urges his followers and activists to remain peaceful but assertive in their campaign for civil rights. His unusual practice of rhetoric changed the game by creating a new method of applying artistic proofs. He uses appeal to emotion throughout, and ends with a heightened state of emotion rather than moderating it at the end. King starts by associating emotions with a negative connotation to the past, bringing determination and persistence with the present, and viewing the future with positive, peaceful, and powerful optimism.…show more content…
The recognition is swiftly followed by the line, “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” The phrase “One hundred years later” is repeated several times with each instance followed by assertions that appeal to the negative side of pathos. A line such as, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” indicates the isolation and tyranny over enslaved African Americans from the earlier years of the country to the present. Repetition of this phrase emphasizes the resentment of the consequences of an unsuccessful attempt to free them not only from slavery, but discrimination and racial segregation. King then employs a metaphor relating the proclamation’s promise of liberty to a, “bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’" This further illustrates the resentful sentiments associated with the

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