I Have A Dream Speech Rhetorical Devices

Martin Luther King Jr., an activist for Civil Rights, wrote a speech that he was going to give out on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation at the Lincoln Memorial. At the same time, King was reading his speech, the famous march for freedom and equality was going on as well. This famous speech was known as the "I Have a Dream" speech. King sets out to give this speech to all American citizens which are the African Americans and whites. He gives this speech to persuade his audience to see his vision of equality for all. King carefully crafts his text with the use of strategies such as an anaphora, metaphor, and the use of emotional appeal..
Within the third paragraph, right off the bat King uses anaphora to emphasize how even after all this time the Negro still are being discriminated against because nothing has really changed. He states, "one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of

He uses this to make his point of the lack of civil rights for African Americans. He says," ...America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' " Basically, he is saying that the thousands of marchers that have gone to the Lincoln Memorial have come to get what the government owes them. The African Americans were given a "bad check" with "insufficient funds" meaning that they were not given the same rights that they were promised as whites in the Constitution. The "bad check" which signifies the Constitution, bounced back because there was still inequality and injustices of failing to provide fairness in society. By saying this he is trying to show the people how the government promised something that they never intended to deliver