No one enjoys the feeling of being discriminated, insulted, being made the punchline of the joke. Imagine walking into a café in the 1960s, and you had to sit in your segregated area, in the dirty unpleasant back corner of the café. Then while you try to enjoy a nice drink after being served last, people approach you – they start calling you names, making insensitive jokes about you, then they squirt tomato sauce on your face, sprinkle salt in your hair and spit on you all for no logical reason – yet if you retaliate in anyway then you could be fined or even jailed for abuse. How do you think you would react? This is what life was like for African-Americans in the mid-20th century, ‘in which the Negro was forced patiently to submit to insult, injustice and exploitation’. So it reached the point where it seemed all hope was lost, until one man decided to take a stand, to become the voice of those who had been silenced by racial injustice and …show more content…
He consistently refers to ‘the Negroes’ as ‘he’, and this is used to signify that ‘the Negroes’ are a single unit, one united community who all share and value similar beliefs and morals. This is used in concurrence with personification to give us as the readers a deeper insight into MLK’s thoughts and truths. An effective example of this method is used to describe the current social status of the Negroes. MLK emphasises the point that ‘Throughout the era of slavery the Negro was treated in inhuman fashion. He was considered a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine.’ In contrary to the editor’s opinion, this example has an immense impact on us as the readers as MLK highlights to us the disrespect, slavery and injustice the united Negro community suffered from due to racial