Equality In Harrison Bergeron

Everyone has their own definition of the word equality. The most common interpretation of the word equality is treating a person fairly no matter what gender, race, religion, age, etc., they are. The United States of America is known as being the country of the free; however it was not always this way. If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “I Have a Dream”, Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die”, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron” are compared, you can see that overall the three works speak about equality. However, each work of literature demonstrate the ideas of equality differently. The differences between the three works are that the speech is the speaker himself expressing how African-Americans are not being treated

It took a man named Abraham Lincoln to sign a proclamation (named the Emancipation Proclamation), to declare slaves free. But even one hundred years later, any person of color was segregated and mistreated just because of their skin color. In the 1950’s, African-Americans could no longer take the racial prejudice, and began to fight back peacefully for equality. Martin Luther King was one of many social activists fighting for equality between races, and he delivered many speeches during his lifetime. One of King’s most famous speeches was “I Have a Dream”, where the main idea of his speech was him expressing the unfair treatment of African-Americans in society and his dream for the future. On lines 52-66 of “I Have a Dream”, King talks about the unfair treatments of African-Americans, and how they will never be satisfied if the “Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality”. He goes onto saying that they will never be satisfied if a person of color’s only option of moving out of the ghetto is moving into an even bigger one, or if a African-Americans child's dignity is taken away by signs saying “For Whites Only”. Besides talking about the unfair treatment of African-Americans, he goes on to speak about his dreams for the future. On lines 71-92 are King’s most famous words.“I say to you today, my friends” he said, “so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”. What King means by this is that he hopes that all people of color continue to fight for their rights, and that in the future that even his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by